IP Contact Centers Cross a Threshold
There's an interesting nugget buried in this article about a recent Gartner report on the IP contact center market. According to the Gartner report, in 2007, for the first time, IP agent stations out-shipped TDM stations for the contact center.
In quoting the Gartner analyst, the article says that, "Given the hype surrounding IP in the call center, 'you would have thought we would have reached this milestone three, four years ago.'"
Actually, I wouldn't have thought that. It was only three, four years ago that IP telephone line shipments out-shipped TDM, and that's for a user base where the mission-criticality of voice to the application and the application to the business are not a given for each and every station. By contrast, roughly 100% of contact center agent stations are mission critical to the business, which is why adoption there lagged the general population in the first place.
But now the crossover has happened, another milestone in the IP telephony migration. As I say, because enterprises were even leerier of putting contact center traffic on IP than other endpoints, this is further indication of the mainstreaming of Voice over IP.
It's also an interesting experiment in Unified Communications, for which contact centers may well be the killer app, as well as a possible testing ground for new types of integration between voice and business applications. We'll see whether UC can do what CTI couldn't: Make the leap from the contact center to the wider enterprise.
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