Last year I wrote a three-part series for No Jitter called the Battle for Contact Center Leadership, highlighting the approaches of Avaya, Cisco and Genesys. Most of the content for the blogs came from contact center analysts meetings the vendors had held.
This week the Avaya contact center business unit held its annual session in Santa Clara. There were two days of executive presentations, in-depth previews of exciting products and wonderful demos (great job by Val Matula and Lloyd Halvosen). And I won't be telling you about any of it here. Like a similar Cisco meeting last month, Avaya's session was a no-tweet zone with more information NDA than not.
Why the shift from varying levels of open kimono to top secret? As stated in the title, I believe it is because the notion of a battle for contact center leadership is not hyperbole. With the combined customers of Avaya and Nortel, Avaya maintains a commanding market share lead. And Cisco is aggressively working to try and overtake them.
Much of the battle will be waged in very large accounts that have for 10+ years operated with multiple contact center solution vendors, e.g., Avaya and Genesys, Avaya and Cisco, Genesys and Cisco. There is increasing evidence that for a host of reasons companies are moving to rationalize the number of vendors required and move to a single solution stack.
Today, Dimension Data published fresh data to support the point. A key finding in the company's 2011 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report is that the convergence of voice, data and video is the number one trend on the agendas of most contact centers. That convergence is often paired with a move to a single vendor.
One of the highlights of the Avaya meeting was a partner roundtable that included Martin Dove, Managing Director for Dimension Data's Customer Interactive Solutions organization that manages the biennial research. In the video below, he discusses some voice, data and video convergence as well as additional contact center trends identified by the study.
