With double-digit growth forecasted in many emerging markets such as China, India, Russia, and Brazil, the contact center market continues to evolve. Vendors are increasingly offering contact center software in addition to more traditional hardware-centric offerings.
Cisco, Avaya, and Alcatel-Lucent continue to dominate with over 70% of market share in the global market. However, other vendors are growing revenue by targeting emerging markets, niche applications or specific verticals (ie: service providers). They are also competing on technology, especially when it comes to cloud-based offerings.
Let’s take a look and see which vendors are giving ‘the big three’ a run for their money.
- Altitude
- Huawei
- Interactive Intelligence
- Aastra
- Mitel
Altitude uCI is a highly scalable, software-based contact center suite that offers interoperability with a wide range of PBX and IP-PBX vendors. They offer multi-channel inbound and outbound capabilities and competitively priced modules including IVR, workforce optimization, routing, call recording, and scripting. They are dominant in Europe and Latin America where 70% of the top contact center outsourcers choose their platform.
A thorn in Cisco’s side, Huawei has grown into a serious contender for contact center deployments in China and other developing markets such as Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. They offer a range of platforms suitable for medium and enterprise businesses that include IP switching, routing, IP-PBX, IVR, CTI, CRM, call recording, and a host of other capabilities both directly and through channel partners.
A global IP business communications software provider, Interactive Intelligence offers a scalable and tightly integrated contact center suite available as cloud-based, on-premise, and hybrid deployments. Customer Interaction Center™’s software platform offers a wide range of capabilities including IP-PBX, PBX, multi-channel routing and recording, IVR, and knowledge management capabilities. They are best suited for companies looking for a scalable, all-in-one contact center suite.
Aastra’s Solidus eCare Multimedia Contact Center (wow, that’s a lot of words) is a good fit for small to medium-sized environments that want telephony, multi-channel, and mobile-phone capabilities from a single vendor. With a range of capabilities including IP routing and queuing, interactive voice response, telemarketing, and web chat, Aastra has established a large user base primarily focused in Europe.
Mitel offers both a business edition of its solution for single-site contact centers with up to 25 agents and an enterprise edition for larger and more sophisticated environments. Primarily focused in North America, they offer a full range of capabilities including workforce management, multi-channel automatic call distribution, outbound dialing, screen pop, and remote agent support.
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I don’t often disagree with you’re posts but I have to speak out on this occasion. I’ve worked with most of the providers you mentioned, but I really can’t understand why you’d put Huawei in this list. The only implementation of a call centre solution I’ve done with them was a far from smooth experience and its still not fixed three years on. They try hard, but quite frankly the cultural and technical difficulties of dealing with them are too great. There are plenty of other safer options out there.
Perhaps some of your other readers have better experiences they can relate.
Hi Paul, your comment is fair. I put them in the list because of the business they’ve been taking away from Cisco over the years. However, they copied a lot of Cisco’s solutions in the process, and as a result are perhaps not worthy of the ‘innovative’ title. But they are doing something right to be growing at such a rate.
Cheers,
Omar