Frost & Sullivan Predicts Moderate Growth for Australian Contact Center Industry
The Australian contact center applications market grew 11.3 percent in 2012, according to Frost & Sullivan, which anticipates the on-premises contact center market there to record a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.2 percent through 2019. Performance optimization, quality management, and multimedia applications continue to be the main drivers of growth, the research firm said.
Frost & Sullivan also points out that while awareness of hosted contact center solutions is high, the fully cloud-based contact center market is still at a nascent stage of growth in Australia. It is expected, though, to experience very high growth at a CAGR of 38.9 percent through 2019 due to a small market base and growing demand from organizations adopting cloud-based contact center solutions.
"Organizations are increasingly evaluating alternative solutions offering similar capabilities with more flexible deployment and payment models," said Audrey William, head of research in Frost & Sullivan's Australia/New Zealand ICT Practice, in a statement. "This is driving demand for hosted and hybrid solutions, where vendors such as Interactive Intelligence have been particularly successful."
However, organizations remain concerned about reliability, security, and availability issues of a fully cloud-based contact center model, the research also found. A hosted contact center solution with dedicated infrastructure mitigates most of these concerns, thereby serving as the preferred option for many organizations.
Frost & Sullivan expects that as the market matures, current challenges, such as security and lack of vendor choice, will be mitigated. The high growth rate will attract new entrants, increasing competition and improving market understanding of cloud-based contact center solutions, it said.
Other findings from the research, which involved 227 IT decision makers in Australia, include the following:
- Sixty percent of Australian organizations are using on-premises contact center solutions.
- Seventeen percent of organizations are using hosted contact centers.
- Just slightly more than 10 percent of organizations have partly migrated to a fully cloud-based contact center solution, where the vendor offers the solution from its own or partner hosted data centers.
- More than 60 percent of organizations are likely to evaluate or deploy cloud-based solutions in the next two years.
- The main requirements for contact centers in the next two years will be providing multichannel support and implementing optimization solutions.
This latest research comes as Frost & Sullivan predicted very small growth in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.