Published: 19 May 2016 ID: G00278585
Analyst(s):
Drew Kraus, Steve Blood
Summary
Contact center infrastructure vendors continue to integrate their multichannel capabilities in order to develop "omnichannel" solutions, while enhancing their cloud delivery capabilities. Contact center decision makers should evaluate vendors' technology and ability to deliver in relevant regions.
Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines contact center infrastructure (CCI) as the products (equipment, software and services) needed to operate call centers for telephony support and contact centers for multichannel support. A third major deployment option for CCI is as a core component of customer engagement centers (CECs), in which functionality is tightly integrated with CRM and social media channels to give a "single view of the customer" across all touchpoints. This type of infrastructure is used by customer and employee service and support centers, inbound and outbound telemarketing services, help desk services, government-operated support centers, and other types of structured communications operations.
Contact center interactions can be people-assisted or automated self-service, using web chat or interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition technologies, for example. They can also be a combination of assisted service and self-service. Channels for interaction use both live agents and messaging technology, and include voice, web, email, instant messaging, web chat, social media, video and mobile devices. Although there can be significant technology overlap between the CCI market and the CRM CEC market, the CCI market has three unique characteristics:
Solutions in the CCI market are often an extension of a unified communications (UC) technology portfolio. Although these solutions can route multichannel interactions, voice and telephony tend to play an important role.
Although CCI solutions include tools for integrating with CRM and other enterprise software packages, they do not typically include this functionality in their own solution stack.
Voice and data network performance and cost issues are often key elements in the design of architecture and solutions.
In contrast, CEC solutions are most frequently an extension of the CRM market, and while they also route multichannel interactions, they tend to focus on channels other than voice, and they support a strong focus on using existing customer data to optimize interactions based on the customer's apparent desired outcome. These differences are significant in that they tend to result in separate decision processes driven by different decision makers within organizations. There is, furthermore, currently little overlap between the vendors appearing in the present Magic Quadrant and those in "Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center." Over time, we expect the two solution sets to merge, but that merger is still several years off.
Contact centers require a wide range of functions, architectures, features and services to be effective. Three major architectural approaches that are common are integrated best-of-breed components, all-in-one bundled suites and cloud-based solutions.
CCI includes a wide range of related technologies, some of which are central to vendors' offerings and some integrated through OEM or partnership relationships with best-of-breed providers. Technology areas can include:
Telephony infrastructure
Multimedia contact routing and prioritization engines with real-time and historical reporting
IVR and voice portals for self-service applications, including speech-enabled self-service
Outbound dialing/proactive contact
Virtual routing applications for multisite and work-at-home scenarios
Presence tools
Tools for integration with CRM software
Data mart and analytics systems
Computer-telephony integration/web services interfaces
Email response management
Web chat
Collaborative browsing
Social media
Live and prerecorded video
Knowledge-based self-service
Workforce management scheduling tools
Session recording and quality monitoring, including speech analytics
Workflow routing and management
Mobile customer service applications
Increasingly, contact center managers prefer to purchase much, or all, of their CCI from a single source as a bundle in the pursuit of easier and enduring integration, cradle-to-grave integrated reporting and analytics, and easier system management. Therefore, leading CCI vendors offering complete portfolios of solutions, comprising their own products and those of partners and other strategic suppliers, are being favored.
The emerging contact center as a service (CCaaS) model — involving hosted, multitenant systems — is gaining attention as cloud approaches increase. Although this Magic Quadrant focuses on premises-based CCI offerings, a vendor's ability to offer viable CCaaS services to customers who may wish to eventually migrate to such services positively impacts its score on the Completeness of Vision axis. However, a vendor that exhibits a very strong shift in business strategy to make CCaaS its primary offering, and to de-emphasize its premises-based solution, may receive a lower score for Completeness of Vision than in the prior edition of this Magic Quadrant. There are currently no CCaaS-only providers that offer a substantial-enough global presence to warrant inclusion in this Magic Quadrant; however, all vendors covered in this Magic Quadrant now provide some form of a hosted or CCaaS offering, either directly or through channel partners.
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide
Source: Gartner (May 2016)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
ALE
ALE is a company based in Paris, France, that is 85% privately owned by China Huaxin and 15% by Alcatel-Lucent, now part of Nokia. ALE has condensed its contact center portfolio into two core platforms: OmniTouch Contact Center Standard Edition and OpenTouch Customer Service Suite (OTCS). OTCS is co-developed with Altitude; it also forms the foundation of ALE's multichannel cloud platform for the contact center.
Organizations committed to an OpenTouch product strategy should consider ALE's contact center portfolio, especially if they prefer to source a solution from a single supplier.
STRENGTHS
ALE is an established brand in enterprise communications, especially in Europe. It has a well-established channel partner program for selling and supporting a range of UC and contact center solutions.
ALE has a strong professional services organization to support its channel partners and customers in implementing and managing contact center solutions.
ALE is executing well on its product consolidation roadmap and strategy to address all contact center market segments with OTCS, a single multichannel platform.
CAUTIONS
Although ALE has strategic co-development and licensing agreements with Altitude, ALE's execution of its contact center strategy would be impaired if Altitude were acquired by a competitor.
In the second year of ALE's majority ownership by China Huaxin, there is still no clear indication of how ALE will achieve its strategic intention of doubling its business in five years. Nor is it clear what role its contact center business will play as part of that stated imperative.
ALE's contact center business performed especially poorly in 2015 in relation to its industry peers, exacerbating the challenges it faces to demonstrate revenue growth in the communications segment.
Altitude
Altitude is a privately held company with headquarters in Portugal. Altitude uCI is a platform-independent, multichannel contact center suite available as a premises-based or cloud offering. Altitude has customers in most vertical markets, and it has particular strengths in the business process outsourcing (BPO) and financial services sectors. It has a strategic relationship with ALE for co-development of uCI, the core software behind ALE's OTCS.
Organizations with integration and workflow needs that desire a platform-independent contact center solution should consider Altitude's uCI.
STRENGTHS
Altitude's continued development of the Asterisk-based vBox increasingly enables it to offer PBX- and Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX-independent contact center solutions.
Strong product and geographical synergies arise from Altitude's partnership with ALE. There is also little competitive overlap, which minimizes channel conflict for partners and customers.
Altitude has strengthened its offer for the BPO sector by means of an integration with Afiniti for behavioral matching of customers to employees.
CAUTIONS
Although Altitude has co-development and licensing agreements with ALE, the lack of equity investment in this important technology partnership could disrupt Altitude's contact center strategy, if ALE were acquired by a competitor.
Despite investing in channels and increasing its management capabilities in Europe, a relative lack of awareness of its brand means that Altitude appears less frequently on shortlists for new opportunities in this region than many of its competitors.
Some organizations have found it challenging to upgrade large and complex deployments of uCI Release 7 to the current Release 8.2. Organizations planning similar projects should be sure to take full advantage of the best-practice migration options and wizards offered by Altitude.
Aspect
Aspect, a U.S.-headquartered, privately held company, is owned predominantly by Golden Gate Capital and Oak Investment Partners. The company has had some success in revitalizing its business since appointing a new management team approximately three years ago, and is now striving to recast itself as a "cloud-first" vendor, offering hosted and/or managed "private cloud" services as well as its Aspect Via and Zipwire CCaaS services. Aspect's premises-based offerings center on its Unified IP platform, which offers a unified multimedia contact center application suite for midsize and large implementations, including several best-of-breed applications. Aspect filed for Chapter 11 structured bankruptcy protection in the U.S. courts in early 2016 and is expected to complete this process shortly after this Magic Quadrant is published.
Organizations should consider Aspect when there is a need to integrate with multiple IP-PBX telephony environments, or when they want to "decouple" the timing of their contact center and telephony investment decisions.
STRENGTHS
Aspect's ability to support multiple vendors' telephony and UC solutions makes it a contender for organizations looking to consolidate their customer service capabilities despite a decentralized approach to other communications technologies, and for organizations that have grown through acquisition.
Aspect has a good ability to deliver solutions to companies that require their systems to be customized to address business-specific needs, including those that require global coverage for sales and support.
Aspect provides best-of-breed functionality in a variety of contributing contact center technology areas, including IVR, workforce optimization and outbound dialer.
CAUTIONS
Customers must assess how confident they are that Aspect will be able to continue to fund development and support of its premises-based contact center offerings and cloud offerings as its installed base, and the derived service revenue (Aspect's largest source of income), decline.
Aspect lacks an enterprise UC installed base of its own to sell to. It must attempt to sell to the UC installed bases of other vendors, which is a challenging task.
Some Gartner clients think Aspect lacks relevance in a market that is moving from call and contact centers to CECs, although this perception may be due to a lack of awareness of Aspect's investments in evolving its products and services.
Avaya
Avaya is a privately held company with headquarters in Santa Clara, California, U.S. It is owned by the private equity firms TPG and Silver Lake Partners. Avaya has multiple contact center platforms, each aimed at a different part of the market. Avaya Aura Call Center Elite is for large enterprises that have a voice-centric customer engagement strategy. Avaya Aura Contact Center (and the Avaya Contact Center Select variant for Avaya IP Office) is intended for midsize multichannel enterprises. Avaya IP Office Contact Center is meant for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).
Organizations of all sizes that have sophisticated call-handling or multichannel requirements should consider Avaya's contact center offerings, which include several best-of-breed applications for contact center environments.
STRENGTHS
Avaya has strong brand recognition with large and corporate organizations for CCI. Its notably strong global footprint helps it satisfy the needs of most types of organization.
The Avaya Breeze platform (formerly the Avaya Engagement Development Platform) and Snap-ins enable developers to quickly create unique communications-enabled contact center applications and workflows.
Avaya Control Manager's system management and partitioning capabilities enable organizations to support multiple contact center applications from a single environment, while allowing user groups to control their own routing rules and customer data.
CAUTIONS
Avaya's approach to managing multiple contact center channels will remain fragmented until a new platform development consolidates all transactions into a single management and reporting capability. This is due for release later in 2016.
Although Avaya has created a coherent strategy for supporting CCaaS, execution through partners is challenged by the limited maturity of the cloud proposition.
Avaya's financial score remains a Caution under Gartner's published methodology for rating IT providers' financial situation. Avaya continues to experience revenue weakness, as evidenced by 16 consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue declines. Despite these revenue reductions, Avaya continues to manage its cost structure so that profitability metrics and cash generation have been favorable.
Cisco
Cisco is a U.S.-headquartered public company with shares traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Cisco's contact center offerings include Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) for large enterprises and those requiring advanced functionality; Packaged Contact Center Enterprise for contact centers that have fewer than 1,500 agents and that want a smaller IT footprint than that of the full UCCE solution; and Unified Contact Center Express for small and midsize contact centers with fewer than 400 agents. A fourth offering, Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise, provides network-level routing and can support multivendor environments. Cloud-based Cisco solutions are also available through select channel partners on the vendor's Hosted Collaboration Solution platform.
Enterprises that favor an end-to-end network, telephony and contact center solution from a single vendor should consider Cisco's contact center offerings, as should enterprises with advanced contact center requirements.
STRENGTHS
Cisco has strong corporate brand recognition and a robust global network of channel partners. As a result, Cisco is frequently shortlisted by organizations looking to replace legacy contact center investments.
Cisco's Finesse Agent Desktop uses REST-based APIs to provide simplified integration of a variety of data sources and application functionalities in support of large, complex contact center deployments.
Cisco's Precision Routing can be used to deliver more targeted matching of agent skills to customer needs. It can also simplify agent skills management in environments that could otherwise require thousands of different skills-based routing scenarios.
CAUTIONS
Cisco relies on partners to deliver a number of core and contributing contact center functionalities, including support for nonvoice communication channels (for UCCE), call recording, workforce management (WFM) and knowledge management. As a result, the combined offerings are less integrated and easy to support than all-in-one suite offerings.
Cisco's contact center solutions work best in an all-Cisco environment, which can be problematic for enterprises wishing to use another vendor's product, like Microsoft's Skype for Business, for their UC platform.
Cisco's go-to-market approach for CCaaS is to sell CCaaS-optimized platforms to service providers, which then offer their own-branded services directly to enterprises. This often reduces enterprises' awareness that Cisco-based CCaaS services are also an option.
Collab
Collab is a wholly owned subsidiary of Novabase, a publicly owned IT services company with headquarters in Portugal. OneContact is Collab's platform-independent solution, which supports multichannel contact center, workforce optimization and back-office PBX capabilities. Nubitalk is a cloud-based variant of OneContact. Nubitalk is delivered using Collab's own network and offered as a service through a reseller network of 40 partners in 30 countries, with a concentration in the Iberian and South American markets.
Organizations looking for a suite capability that covers contact center, workforce optimization and back-office PBX capabilities should consider OneContact where there is a geographical match.
STRENGTHS
OneContact is a suite with a strong focus on integrating contact center capabilities with workforce optimization, gamification and back-office PBX requirements.
Nubitalk was designed from the start to be a mobile-centric, cloud-based enterprise communications platform with a strong product focus on a customer self-service portal, which is available as a "white label" solution through partners.
Collab is able to use Novabase's scale to improve its administration and operational efficiency.
CAUTIONS
In a mature contact center market, Collab lacks the brand recognition of its larger competitors. This reduces the frequency with which it is considered in requests for proposals.
Collab has a growing presence in Iberian and emerging markets but lacks broad channel and support capabilities in the larger markets of North America and northern Europe.
Although ownership by Novabase has benefited Collab in terms of operational performance, there has been limited additional investment by Novabase for strategic acquisitions that could accelerate Collab's product or market growth.
Enghouse Interactive
Enghouse Interactive is a public company headquartered in Canada, with shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Enghouse has three distinct contact center offerings. Contact Center: Enterprise targets enterprise premises-based contact center environments and virtualized cloud environments. Contact Center: Service Provider targets service provider environments and very large enterprises (which use the product to offer contact center services to end users via the cloud). Communications Center targets small and midsize contact centers.
Consider Contact Center: Enterprise when looking for a premises-based or virtualized multimedia contact center routing solution that can work in a variety of IP-PBX and Microsoft Lync infrastructure environments. Consider Contact Center: Service Provider when looking for a multitenant enterprise offering for private cloud environments, or when seeking a platform from which to offer cloud-based solutions as a communications service provider (CSP). Consider Communications Center when seeking a multichannel contact center solution for fewer than 500 agents.
STRENGTHS
Enghouse's Contact Center: Enterprise and Communications Center offerings work well for companies looking to integrate their front-office contact center platform with their choice of back-office UC and telephony platforms.
Enghouse's Communications Center offers strong integration with Microsoft Skype for Business UC solutions.
Enghouse expanded its global enterprise sales channel partnerships in 2015, enabling it to gain access to a broader range of sales opportunities.
CAUTIONS
Enghouse lacks strong brand recognition among contact center decision makers. This limits its ability to grow its contact center business even faster.
Although it is making progress, Enghouse has yet to complete its plan to consolidate its investments in technologies that can span its market-specific platform offerings, including knowledge management, dialer and some PBX integrations.
Enghouse's lack of a consistent product set and presence across all geographies makes it difficult for it to meet the needs of large, global enterprises.
Genesys
Genesys is a privately held company with headquarters in the U.S. and major private equity investment from Permira. Genesys supports three primary offerings based on its Customer Experience Platform. Genesys Premier Edition is a cloud-only offering for companies with fewer than 250 agents. Genesys Business Edition is aimed at companies with up to 1,000 agents; it is available as a cloud, on-premises or hybrid solution. Genesys Enterprise Edition is for companies of any size that require a rich feature set and strong levels of customization; it is available as a cloud, on-premises or hybrid solution.
Consider Genesys for contact center solutions that span a variety of levels of complexity and scalability, including those that require significant customization to address differentiated customer service needs.
STRENGTHS
Genesys has a strong vision for decoupling contact center applications from telephony infrastructure; extending contact center capabilities into websites, mobile apps, UC environments and enterprise workflow beyond the contact center; and integrating social-media-based communications into structured contact center activities.
Genesys provides an advanced set of "omnichannel journey management" tools, and Gartner clients often consider it a thought-leader in this emerging sector.
Genesys provides strong consulting and system integration services, either directly or through its professional services partners globally.
CAUTIONS
Genesys Enterprise Edition is often seen as more costly to implement and maintain than solutions from competing companies.
Genesys is often perceived as being a poor fit for organizations wanting midmarket solutions and for those that do not require support for high levels of complexity.
Although it is making progress, Genesys has not achieved the same strong levels of adoption with CCaaS offerings as some of its competitors.
Huawei
Huawei is a privately held company headquartered in China, with shares held primarily by the company's employees. Huawei's eSpace contact centers run on its Soft ACD UAP9600 and UAP6600 platforms for large enterprise and CSP environments; its eSpace U2980 platform with software-based media gateway controller and media resource platform for enterprises (which can be packaged as an all-in-one contact center appliance offering); and its UAP3300 platform for small and midsize contact centers.
Price-sensitive CSPs, enterprises and government agencies, particularly those in the Asia/Pacific region (especially China) and emerging economies, should consider Huawei when looking for cost-effective solutions.
STRENGTHS
In addition to contact center offerings, Huawei has data networking and telephony solutions for enterprises wanting to consolidate all their communications investments with a single vendor.
Huawei has made progress in expanding its global distribution network, particularly in Africa, Brazil and China, and in emerging economies in Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe and Latin America.
In 2016, Huawei plans to port its eSpace contact center enterprise offerings to its converged EC6.0 platform, to provide a more cost-effective and consolidated platform for contact center, UC and video collaboration, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
CAUTIONS
Although Huawei is expanding globally, it has no plans to enter the North American market at this point, and it has had limited success at growing its presence in Western Europe. This makes it difficult for Huawei to support the needs of many global enterprises.
Huawei lacks strong brand recognition for its enterprise contact center offerings outside its core market of China.
Huawei lacks its own enterprise-targeted offerings for technologies such as workforce management and knowledge management. This makes implementation and support more complex than with complete CCI suites.
Interactive Intelligence
Interactive Intelligence is a U.S.-headquartered public company, with shares traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Interactive's Customer Interaction Center (CIC) provides an all-in-one suite of contact center applications for a wide range of scalability requirements. The vendor is also gaining market traction with Communications as a Service (CaaS), a single-tenant cloud-based option, and it released a PureCloud Engage multitenant cloud-based option in 2H15.
Enterprises looking for a tightly integrated set of contact center applications, or to decouple the timing of their contact center and telephony investment decisions, should consider Interactive's offerings.
STRENGTHS
Interactive's CIC provides a common set of application development, management and reporting tools across a range of applications. This makes it particularly appealing to IT decision makers.
Interactive continues to compete successfully for midsize and large contact center deals, and to grow its global customer base at a pace well above the market average.
Interactive has shown early success in the CCaaS market with its multi-instance CaaS offering. It can now be more feature- and price-competitive with the release of its multitenant PureCloud Engage service.
CAUTIONS
Interactive Intelligence has historically been a single-product company, but the introduction of PureCloud Engage introduces a second product line. As the company expands its portfolio, this may cause confusion in the marketplace.
Interactive lacks the brand recognition of some of its key competitors outside the North American market.
Some of Interactive's contact center capabilities, such as workforce optimization and system reporting, are less feature-rich than some of the offerings of other vendors in the Leaders quadrant.
Mitel
Mitel is a public company headquartered in Canada, with shares traded on the Nasdaq and Toronto stock markets. Mitel's portfolio of premises-based solutions includes MiContact Center Office Edition for single-site deployments with fewer than 600 agents; MiContact Center Business Edition, a prepackaged application set for deployments with fewer than 1,500 agents; and MiContact Center Enterprise Edition, based on the company's acquired Aastra Solidus eCare contact center functionality, which supports a broad suite of applications for enterprises with up to 16,000 agents. Mitel also supports three CCaaS offerings: MiCloud Business Contact Center is a multitenant service with phone agent interfaces, dashboards and reporting intended for small, informal contact centers. MiCloud Enterprise Contact Center is a multi-instance solution and is available at feature-parity with on-premises implementations. Mitel's MiContact Center Live is based on an OEM CCaaS offering, and targets larger or multichannel environments.
Consider Mitel's solutions when looking for a wide range of common contact center capabilities, particularly when integrating with a Mitel UC offering or when evaluating future integration with Microsoft Skype for Business.
STRENGTHS
Mitel continues to win contact center deals for up to several thousand agents.
Mitel's MiContact Center Business Edition will support integration with Microsoft Skype for Business in 2H16.
Mitel has shown particular strength in selling to the healthcare, local-government, community banking and retail sectors.
CAUTIONS
Mitel has limited brand recognition among contact center decision makers. It primarily targets its installed base of UC and UC-as-a-service users, which limits its ability to grow its market share and brand recognition.
Mitel's broad portfolio of contact center products dilutes its investment in R&D, with many resources focused on integrating existing products, rather than developing new capabilities.
At an organizational level, Mitel is pursuing a strategy of growth through acquisition, which means that significant resources are used for rationalizing solutions, integrating assets and training partners. This approach can disrupt and slow Mitel's business activities.
NEC
NEC is a public company headquartered in Japan, with shares traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. NEC's flagship multimedia contact center offering is Univerge 3C, which supports customers ranging from SMBs to companies with thousands of call center agents.
Enterprises with an existing NEC telephony system, those using big data in their contact centers, and those seeking an all-in-one solution for UC and collaboration and contact centers should consider NEC.
STRENGTHS
Users in industries such as hospitality, healthcare, education and government are attracted to NEC's industry-specific solutions.
NEC has a large installed base of Univerge 3C UC customers to which it can sell its contact center platform.
NEC has a large global network of enterprise-focused channel partners.
CAUTIONS
NEC has low brand recognition in the North American and Western European contact center markets. This limits its ability to sell to global companies with significant presence in these key markets.
NEC's contact center portfolio sales activities are aimed primarily at organizations that already have significant NEC telephony environments. Gartner sees limited results from NEC's attempts to broaden the appeal of its contact center solutions and displace other vendors.
Despite identifying Univerge 3C as its flagship contact center offering, Univerge 3C shipments make up only a small percentage of NEC's contact center sales; the majority of its sales are delivered as custom development projects or smaller, appliance-based offerings for SMBs.
Presence Technology
Presence Technology, which is headquartered in Spain, is a privately funded company owned by the private equity division of Valora. Presence Suite is a portfolio of multimedia modular contact center applications that are primarily deployed as stand-alone capabilities with the Presence OpenGate telephony engine, or as an adjunct to Avaya Aura Communication Manager. Although Presence Suite has been most referenced for BPO, Presence is increasingly focusing on delivering inbound contact center and web customer service solutions to the financial, insurance and healthcare sectors.
Organizations looking for a platform-independent solution with particular strengths in scripting and workflow capabilities should consider Presence.
STRENGTHS
Presence has executed its growth initiatives well, and now has a nearly equal split of revenue between Europe, Africa, North America and Latin America.
Presence's operational-expenditure-based license revenue for both cloud and on-premises deployments exceeds 40% of its total license revenue. This positions it well for a further transition from traditional licensing that offers perpetual usage rights to utility-based licensing.
Presence's scripting and workflow strengths should prove useful for meeting the increasing demand from customer service organizations for stronger omnichannel experiences.
CAUTIONS
Although its expansion under challenging market conditions is impressive, Presence remains smaller than most of its competitors and lacks broad brand recognition. This limits its chances of being considered by potential customers, unless it is suggested by one of its channel partners.
Presence SmartCloud is a CCaaS offering that Presence launched in 2015 in Spain and for which it has only conservative plans to roll out to the Americas and the U.K.
Presence will find it challenging to increase its size through inorganic growth, unless its owners are prepared to be more acquisitive.
SAP
SAP, which has headquarters in Germany, is a public company, with shares traded on the Frankfurt and New York Stock Exchanges. SAP targets the CCI market as a business of SAP Labs, a division through which SAP drives its R&D investments. SAP Contact Center is positioned as a function of SAP's Customer Engagement and Commerce business unit for delivering omnichannel customer engagement integrated with SAP's business application and SAP Cloud offerings.
SAP Contact Center is a stronger fit for organizations committed to the SAP suite of business applications and SAP Cloud for Customer offerings than it is for organizations looking for a stand-alone, multichannel contact center suite.
STRENGTHS
As part of SAP Labs, SAP's contact center software division has some autonomy to operate as an independent business, while benefiting from the brand name of a leading provider of business application software.
SAP Contact Center is a scalable suite with multitenant properties provided by "Virtual Units." This aligns it well with SAP's portfolio of customer service applications based on its Hana cloud platform.
SAP Contact Center's positioning as a function of SAP Hybris Service — a new strategy for customer service and support — strengthens SAP's contact center proposition for customers of its broader portfolio of software.
CAUTIONS
There has been minimal investment to expand SAP's contact center portfolio as a stand-alone capability. Consequently, growth in SAP's contact center business relies on organic growth from SAP's business application portfolio.
Tighter integration with SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer and SAP Hybris Service Engagement Center for the omnichannel customer experience makes SAP Contact Center a less attractive proposition for customers not committed to SAP customer service applications.
SAP Contact Center continues to rely on separate cloud platforms in the SAP portfolio to deliver a complete omnichannel experience. This could make it challenging to manage end-to-end service levels.
ShoreTel
ShoreTel is a public company, headquartered in California, U.S., with shares traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange. ShoreTel Connect Contact Center (CCC) is a single software solution that is currently deployed as an on-premises offering. It was launched in 2015 as the next generation of ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center. ShoreTel Connect Contact Center for Onsite (for on-premises deployment) will be accompanied by cloud and hybrid offerings (ShoreTel Connect Contact Center for Cloud and ShoreTel Connect Contact Center for Hybrid) by mid-2016.
ShoreTel CCC is well-suited to midsize organizations already committed to the ShoreTel portfolio of products and with limited contact center requirements.
STRENGTHS
ShoreTel is an established communications business with a strong cash position and no debt. It is focused mostly on the needs of midsize organizations.
ShoreTel has a strong channel partner methodology, developed from its focus on midsize businesses in North America. It is extending this program across the globe to support its contact center portfolio.
The emerging ShoreTel Connect strategy for supporting on-premises, cloud and hybrid deployments with a common suite of technology is a promising development.
CAUTIONS
The ShoreTel CCC platform is limited in terms of multichannel functionality for voice, email and chat. Support for SMS, video and social channels has yet to be delivered.
Although ShoreTel has a strong channel program, three-quarters of its business is still concentrated in North America, and international business is mostly done in English-speaking countries. This limits the company's ability to support global organizations with a single contact center technology.
A lack of embedded Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) capabilities prevents ShoreTel from operating as a stand-alone contact center platform.
Unify
Unify is a wholly owned subsidiary of Atos, a global system integration and outsourcing business headquartered in France. OpenScape Contact Center Enterprise is Unify's flagship, multichannel platform for midsize and large organizations with up to 7,500 users. Unify has a partnership with inContact for the OpenScape Cloud Contact Center offering, and another with Genesys for very high-end, complex requirements. It also plans to resell Atos Worldline products in its cloud portfolio. OpenScape Contact Center Agile is positioned for small and midsize deployments for less than 100 agents. OpenScape Business myAgent is an all-in-one solution for up to 64 agents. OpenScape Contact Center Campaign Director is for outbound and telemarketing activities.
Organizations committed to, or considering, the Unify portfolio should consider OpenScape Contact Center Enterprise as a contender for OpenScape infrastructures. OpenScape Cloud Contact Center is an option for those seeking an infrastructure-independent CCaaS offering.
STRENGTHS
Unify had undergone extensive restructuring, funded by its former owners Siemens AG and the Gores Group. Now, as a subsidiary of Atos, it is in a financially stronger position to execute a growth plan for its communications and contact center business.
The OpenScape Contact Center Agent Portal is a promising development in support of an omnichannel customer experience.
Unify's global professional services team is able to source best practices and skills from Atos in support of its portfolio of contact center solutions, both directly and through partners.
CAUTIONS
Unify's contact center business unit performed especially poorly in 2015, relative to industry peers, as shipments fell by 22% on the previous year. It will need a significant turnaround to be perceived as viable, both internally and externally.
Unify's OpenScape Contact Center Enterprise is progressing toward platform-independence with preferred devices, but it still requires separate appliance servers for contact center, voice portal and outbound dialer functions.
Unify has too many competing contact center solutions in its portfolio. It is unclear whether Atos favors continued development of the Unify product portfolio or use of other solutions, such as those of Atos Worldline and partners like Genesys.
Vocalcom
Vocalcom, which has headquarters in France, is a privately owned company, with Apax Partners the majority shareholder. Vocalcom uses a common software platform to power its Vocalcom Cloud Contact Center, Vocalcom Cloud Contact Center for Salesforce, Vocalcom Virtual Contact Center and Vocalcom Virtual Contact Center for Avaya.
The contact center suite solutions are offered primarily as cloud-based solutions, but can also be deployed on-premises and with perpetual-license terms. Vocalcom Cloud Contact Center solutions can be deployed in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Salesforce's Force.com cloud infrastructures. Vocalcom retains strength in the BPO market, with products that serve as adjuncts to Avaya Aura Communication Manager, but it is also expanding into new territories with new management and channel development activities.
Organizations looking for a platform-independent suite solution or for cloud deployment should consider Vocalcom.
STRENGTHS
Vocalcom's Cloud Contact Center approach has enabled it to expand into new markets by using flexible third-party infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
Vocalcom is making strong progress in offering cloud services in Western Europe and Latin America.
Vocalcom's history of offering solutions to outsourcers on a utility license basis positions it well to migrate its enterprise customers on to one of its Cloud Contact Center platforms.
CAUTIONS
Vocalcom's continued strength in the BPO market overshadows awareness of its broader customer services and multichannel capabilities, although growth in these sectors is also good.
Although Vocalcom can demonstrate scalable deployments with private cloud and dedicated infrastructure, its public IaaS approach needs time to mature its public cloud replacement for its private cloud offerings.
Management turnover in North America has hampered Vocalcom's progress toward securing a larger share of this mature market.
ZTE
ZTE, which has headquarters in China, is a public company, with shares traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. ZTE's Next Generation Call Center (NGCC) suite supports highly scalable multimedia contact center capabilities, with strong support for both inbound and outbound operations in cloud- and premises-based configurations. Its AnyService@ZXNGCC multimedia unified contact center product is based on its ZXMSQ10 SoftACD switch and system, or its ZXNGCC all-IP-based contact center switching solution. ZTE also offers the ZXQ20 appliance-based all-in-one contact center solution for small and midsize contact centers.
Consider ZTE's NGCC suite for deployments in China and emerging economies, particularly when the requirement is for price-competitive solutions that scale to thousands of agents (for example, in CSP and contact center BPO environments).
STRENGTHS
ZTE's NGCC suite is designed for CSPs to provide multiple multitenant virtual contact centers for their enterprise customers, especially those in the call center service outsourcing business.
ZTE's NGCC suite can be deployed as an all-software solution running on a next-generation-network softswitch or an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network for greater efficiency in CSP environments.
ZTE has a strong ability to sell solutions to CSPs in China and many emerging economies.
CAUTIONS
ZTE lacks brand recognition for enterprise contact center sales outside China.
ZTE lacks a broad base of enterprise-focused channel partners or CSP partners with a strong understanding of the best practices used in contact center environments.
ZTE's ZXQ20 appliance-based, bundled contact center offering for small and midsize contact centers has achieved limited adoption so far. Potential users should check their supplier's experience with this product and check local customers' references.
Vendors Added and Dropped
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.
Added
Dropped
Honorable Mentions
The following vendors are not included in this Magic Quadrant because they ship products predominantly to a single country or did not meet other inclusion criteria, but they are appropriate for certain situations and they sometimes compete against vendors that are included in this Magic Quadrant:
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
To be included in this Magic Quadrant, solution providers had to demonstrate all of the following capabilities:
Premises-based contact center product and service revenues in excess of $10 million in the calendar year 2015.
Evidence of sales, marketing and operational presence in a minimum of three of the following geographical regions: Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, Japan, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, North America, and Western Europe. We required evidence that vendors operated sales offices in those regions and were actively selling contact center solutions in those regions; they could not just sell solutions in one region for delivery in the other regions. We also required vendors to have multiple-language web presence. Vendors could meet these requirements directly and/or through channel partners.
Significant market share in the geographic markets specified above.
Sufficient sales and operational presence to support market objectives.
Demonstrable solutions in a minimum of five of the CCI technology areas defined in the Market Definition/Description section of this document.
Ability to generate significant interest by leading client market segments.
Each vendor was also required to provide five reference customers for multichannel routing (not just voice).
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Gartner analysts evaluate CCI technology providers based on the breadth, quality and overall maturity of their applications, customer support capabilities, and ability to deliver solutions that enable contact center operations in the formal contact centers of midsize or large enterprises. Ultimately, CCI technology providers are judged on their ability to capitalize on their vision and their success in doing so.
Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria
|
Weighting
|
|---|
Product or Service
|
High
|
Overall Viability
|
High
|
Sales Execution/Pricing
|
Medium
|
Market Responsiveness/Record
|
Medium
|
Marketing Execution
|
Medium
|
Customer Experience
|
Medium
|
Operations
|
Medium
|
Source: Gartner (May 2016)
Completeness of Vision
Gartner analysts evaluate CCI technology providers based on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements about current and future market directions, innovations, customer needs and competitive forces, and how well these map to Gartner's overall understanding of the market. Ultimately, CCI technology providers are evaluated on their understanding of how market forces can be exploited to create opportunities for them and their clients.
Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria
|
Weighting
|
|---|
Market Understanding
|
High
|
Marketing Strategy
|
Medium
|
Sales Strategy
|
Medium
|
Offering (Product) Strategy
|
High
|
Business Model
|
Medium
|
Vertical/Industry Strategy
|
Medium
|
Innovation
|
Medium
|
Geographic Strategy
|
Medium
|
Source: Gartner (May 2016)
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders are high-viability vendors with broad portfolios, significant market share, broad geographic coverage, a clear vision of how contact center needs will evolve, and a proven track record of delivering contact center solutions. They are well-positioned with their current product portfolio and likely to continue delivering leading products. Leaders do not necessarily offer a best-of-breed solution for every customer requirement. However, overall, their products are strong and often have some exceptional capabilities. Additionally, these vendors provide solutions that pose a relatively low risk of deployment failure.
Challengers
Challengers are vendors with strong market capabilities and good solutions for specific markets. However, overall, their products lack the breadth and depth of those in the Leaders quadrant. Challengers do not always communicate a clear vision of how the contact center market is evolving, and they are often less innovative or advanced than Leaders. Challengers often excel at selling contact center functionality to their existing PBX and IP telephony customers.
Visionaries
Visionaries demonstrate a clear understanding of the contact center market and provide key innovations that point to the market's future. However, they typically lack the ability to influence a large portion of the market, have not yet expanded their sales and support capabilities on a regional basis, or do not yet have the funding to execute with the same capabilities as the Leaders.
Niche Players
Niche Players offer contact center products that focus on a segment of the market or a subset of its functionality. Customers aligned with the focus of a Niche Player may find its offerings to be a good fit for their needs.
Context
The market for CCI has entered an innovative and dynamic phase in which multiple forces are impacting purchase and deployment decisions in new ways. These forces include:
Decoupling of CCI from telephony/UC: CCI purchases have traditionally been closely linked to a company's chosen telephony vendor. However, these purchase decisions have increasingly been decoupled in recent years. One factor driving the decoupling of CCI from telephony infrastructure is that, as companies increasingly tie their telephony decisions to their broader UC strategies, they often want their CCI purchases to offer them flexibility of deployment, should their UC strategy draw them away from their existing telephony vendor. A prime example of this is seen when companies plan to evolve their UC strategies to focus on Microsoft Skype for Business. Because Microsoft does not currently offer its own robust CCI solution, contact center decision makers and planners may opt to select a CCI solution from a company whose enterprise communications application business is not heavily tied to an enterprise telephony or UC product line.
Adoption of CCaaS: A second significant force for change in the CCI market is the increasing propensity of CCI decision makers to consider, and often select, CCaaS offerings as a replacement for premises-based solutions. In many cases, the CCI vendors that also have UC offerings lack mature CCaaS offerings, and Gartner clients often feel compelled to change vendors in order to access more mature CCaaS services. In some cases, this decision is driven by the aforementioned desire to decouple a company's CCI and telephony/UC decisions. In other cases, it is driven by other factors, including the desire to switch from a capital expenditure acquisition model to an operating expense model and the potential for a lower total cost of ownership; the need to scale license usage up and down to match seasonal staffing demands; the need for more rapid deployment; and/or a desire to focus investments and staffing on core business products and services.
Shift to a holistic view of customer engagement: The contact center market is also evolving from a focus on discrete, one-off customer interactions using a variety of communications channel silos to a more integrated and holistic view of customer activities and workflows, given that a customer may engage in a variety of different activities in the course of completing a customer journey. This focus on context-aware, multichannel (including web self-service and social media), reactive and proactive interactions is shaping the evolution of contact centers into CECs. This change in focus is still in its early phases in terms of adoption and, at present, there is more vendor hype than actual customer service transformation. However, as phone-based customer service is declining in popularity, relative to other communications channels, many mainstream technology adopters are at least planning to orchestrate their various customer interaction channels more effectively by moving to a more convenient, cohesive and consistent customer experience.
Drive toward multichannel engagement: The drive to develop the contact center into a customer-experience-centric CEC is injecting additional dynamics into the contact center market. Companies are beginning to alter their evaluation and selection of vendors to provide nonvoice channels (email, web chat, video chat, social and so on) to their customer service environments. Over the past five to 10 years, many enterprises have looked either to their CRM vendors or best-of-breed specialists to provide these customer interaction channels. However, voice-based interactions continue to make up a significant portion of interactions in contact centers. As such, as companies look to evolve their customer support to become more customer-centric across all interaction channels, some are recognizing the potential benefits of acquiring both their voice and nonvoice channels as a package from a single vendor — and very few CRM vendors support phone-based-assisted customer service. Benefits include the use of a consistent business rule management capability for routing, queuing and escalating interactions across channels, thus enabling a company to prioritize the handling of the best customers regardless of customers' chosen channels. Obtaining all interaction applications from a single vendor also makes it easier for companies to manage reporting and staffing across channels, rather than having to integrate operational performance data across separate systems.
Addition of knowledge management and interaction orchestration capabilities: Many of the leading "traditional" contact center vendors are adding to their application suites knowledge management capabilities (for enhanced multichannel self-service) and interaction orchestration capabilities (to make better use of customer context information from multiple enterprise data sources and support customer journeys across interaction channels). Although these enhanced suites are still in the early stages of adoption, they are beginning to pose a challenge to the more common decision to obtain the nonvoice channels from CRM vendors or best-of-breed specialists.
Integration of workforce optimization capabilities: The integration of workforce optimization (WFO) capabilities under the umbrella of contact center application suites is further along the evolution path toward a greater breadth of capabilities than is the integration of nonvoice channels. WFO solutions have traditionally been purchased as "point" solutions in the WFO application stack (for example, from separate WFM, recording, quality assurance, analytics and e-learning vendors) or from vendors offering integrated WFO suites. However, in recent years, a number of leading CCI vendors have added functionality to their application suites that can now rival the offerings of WFO specialists, at least for companies needing mid-level functionality; and, in some cases, they now rival the WFO specialists in delivering high-end WFO capabilities. It should be noted, however, that even those CCI vendors that have incorporated WFO capabilities into their application suites will also support tight integrations with the WFO specialists, as most of the installed base requires support for these integrations.
Market Overview
The positioning of vendors on this Magic Quadrant has undergone several changes — some quite significant — driven largely by changes in vendors' strategy, performance and technology.
Vendors in the Leaders quadrant tend to have strong product functionality and roadmaps that are very much in line with our clients' requirements. They appear frequently on our clients' shortlists. In the Leaders quadrant, both Cisco and Genesys held their positions in terms of Ability to Execute, while slightly improving their positions on the Completeness of Vision axis, as their developments in customer journey analytics are beginning to resonate with Gartner clients. Avaya, continued to lead the market in terms of agent license shipments, but declined in terms of Ability to Execute as the company continues to suffer erosion of its installed base, despite continuing to invest in its contact center offerings. Interactive Intelligence also remained in the Leaders quadrant, as its product vision and execution resonate strongly with many Gartner clients, despite its market share being smaller than that of some other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. However, Interactive has announced that it has made its relatively new PureCloud Engage multitenant CCaaS offering its leading contact center offering, which has led some Gartner clients to call into question the company's commitment to developing its premises-based CIC offering. As a result, its score for Completeness of Vision has declined slightly.
Vendors in the Challengers quadrant tend to have good, although not leading, product functionality and roadmaps. However, they tend not to appear on Gartner client shortlists as frequently as do the Leaders, which indicates that their market visions do not resonate as strongly with Gartner clients. In the Challengers quadrant, Huawei and NEC held their positions by enhancing their offerings and Ability to Execute at a pace equivalent to improvements seen in the market overall. Mitel improved its position slightly as it has simplified its set of offerings while exceeding the market's growth. Enghouse Interactive is now a Challenger, thanks to the biggest improvement of any vendor in the Magic Quadrant. Enghouse showed good market traction for its SMB-targeted offering, particularly among channel partners and end users looking for a platform that provides native integration with Microsoft's Skype for Business UC offering; it also grew its enterprise- and service provider-focused contact center businesses.
Vendors in the Visionaries quadrant are so placed on the basis of their differentiated functionality. Aspect is a Visionary largely due to its strong capabilities in ancillary contact center applications, including IVR, WFO and dialer. Aspect's position has slipped on both axes, as the company has announced that its as-yet-unproven Aspect Via and Zipwire CCaaS offerings will be its lead offerings; the transition from "premises first" to "cloud first" could be challenging for a company already seeing declines in its largest revenue source, namely maintenance revenue from its diminishing number of premises-based customers. SAP is a Visionary due to tight integration with the company's CRM and ERP offerings, including the Hana big data analytics platform. SAP's position held steady, as the company improved in terms of vision and execution at a pace comparable to that of the broader market. Collab, a newcomer to this Magic Quadrant, delivers a solution that resonates with enterprise clients due to its breadth of functionality, including a tightly integrated WFO offering that makes innovative use of gamification to improve agents' performance.
Vendors in the Niche Players quadrant often have good, although not leading, product functionality, combined with limited ability to execute beyond a specific market niche. Both Unify and ALE have slipped from the Challengers quadrant to the Niche Players quadrant due to declining go-to-market execution, despite having large UC installed bases to sell to; Gartner generally sees these vendors' customers now looking for alternative vendors. Altitude, Presence Technology and Vocalcom all remained Niche Players. All three improved their position for both Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. ZTE also remained a Niche Player; its position held steady as its performance against both axes generally matched the pace of improvement in the market. ShoreTel, a newcomer to this Magic Quadrant, is also a Niche Player, albeit with some of the lowest agent license shipments and with sales largely to its installed base of UC customers.
Evaluation Criteria Definitions
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.
