Joe Staples, Interactive Intelligence
INDIANAPOLIS – Changes are afoot in the contact centre space and it involves stepping into the cloud, according Joe Staples, chief marketing officer at Interactive Intelligence Inc., an Indianapolis-based unified communications solutions provider, who singled out hosted services as the big story in 2010 for the company.
“Instead of putting all the equipment on their site and managing it and having it inside of their IT resources, they’re looking to a vendor who hosts it in a secure data centre and serves up the applications – we’re seeing a big shift towards that worldwide,” Staples said.
The communications-as-a-service (CaaS) offering has already proven profitable for Interactive Intelligence since its introduction three years ago. Compared to last year, the company, which held its annual user forum this week in Indianapolis, saw its CaaS revenues grow 59 per cent.
In Canada, the trend is similar, according to Jo-Anne Finney, Interactive Intelligence’s country manager in Canada. “I definitely see the same trend and what’s interesting is we’re seeing it across all company sizes,” she said. “I think originally when companies first started off in hosted, the expectation was just smaller organizations, but we’re seeing very large organizations just simply saying, ‘We don’t want to manage this technology, we just want to access the technology on a subscription basis.’”
The heightened interest in hosted contact centre services is a relatively new one. Staples estimated he’s seen a significant uptake in only the last nine months despite the availability of CaaS for the past three years. “From a customer perspective, their interest level increased because I think they saw trends and other people moving toward (the cloud) and the wave just made a big surge in the last nine months,” he explained. “Strategically, they’re moving a lot of things to the cloud. They’re looking to move database services and CRM and e-mail so they’re saying, ‘Doesn’t it make sense to do our communications as well?’”
