This document was revised on 28 June 2011. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

The contact center infrastructure market continues its trend toward consolidation of vendors, as it has for several years. Three vendors, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent (Genesys) and Cisco, combined now make up more than 70% of end-user revenue for the global market. However, other vendors continue to grow revenue by employing a variety of strategies. These strategies include, among others, focusing on differentiated technology for various enterprises' needs, offering solutions that target the service provider, targeting innovation toward niche applications such as dialer solutions, and targeting emerging markets that may offer faster market growth rates and more greenfield opportunities than those in mature markets such as North America, Western Europe and developed portions of Asia/Pacific.

Although some best-of-breed "point solutions" will remain relevant, customers are increasingly moving to broader contact center solutions as tightly integrated suites or more loosely integrated portfolios from "cornerstone" vendors, and all vendors covered by this report offer significant functionality beyond basic phone call routing and prioritization. Furthermore, many enterprises are recognizing the potential synergies between their customer-facing contact center infrastructure and software solutions, with their current or planned investments in internal-facing unified communications architectures and must consider how these investment strategies can coexist and potentially share communication and collaboration components. It is worth noting that today's unified communications solutions are based on the technologies that transformed basic "call" centers into "contact" centers by making compound communications including fax, email, chat, voice, video and Web conferencing available.

This research captures Gartner's view of the general state of the market and evaluates vendors' capabilities on a global basis (see Figure 1). It is not intended as specific advice for any one user company's situation. Companies planning to acquire new or replacement contact center infrastructure should contact Gartner analysts to discuss how this generalized model applies in their specific country as well, as how it applies to their specific business environment and needs.

The contact center infrastructure market is largely a mature market in North America, Western Europe, and developed portions of Asia/Pacific, with most sales being expansions of, or replacements of, existing systems. However, contact center infrastructure is still an emerging technology in many other geographies around the globe, especially those experiencing rapid industrialization and growth of service industries such as the countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) — with many forecast to grow at double-digit compound annual growth rates through 2015.

The market has traditionally been dominated by the leading vendors in the enterprise telephony space, although smaller players continue to find defendable market niches, either through low price, geographic or vertical market specialization, differentiating technologies or combinations of these.

Contact center infrastructure solutions have traditionally been hardware-centric, but most vendors' solutions are now shipped as software that the customer can run on properly configured commercial, off-the-shelf servers, although some still require proprietary components. The majority of shipped solutions are based on Internet standards, including TCP/Internet Protocol (IP) in telephony and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which enables the systems to more readily support operationally or geographically separate contact centers on a centrally deployed system and provide for greater scale in the application platform. The use of Internet standards also enables contact center functionality to be embedded into third-party applications, such as CRM or ERP systems. SIP also enables tighter integration of modules within contact center vendors' portfolios of products, although the promise of intervendor interoperability continues to be difficult to achieve. SIP also promises to help integrate other enterprise communications applications, such as presence and conferencing — or alternatively, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) in the case of presence. This will enable contact centers to incorporate communications and collaboration more easily with subject matter experts inside the organization but outside of contact center staff, and will help to integrate the technology more tightly into enterprise unified communications and collaboration (UCC) strategies, although adoption rates for these holistic solutions currently remain low.

The market has been consolidating over time and incumbent vendors are looking to expand their solutions portfolios to incorporate additional capabilities that commonly play a role in contact center "ecosystems." These capabilities include interactive voice response (IVR), outbound dialers, contact center workforce management, recording, e-learning, Web chat, email response management, live and prerecorded video, desktop collaboration, analytics and workflow. This creates challenges to those that grow through acquisition or who develop these solutions as separate, point-solution offerings, in that a portfolio approach (rather than a more tightly integrated suite approach) results in an environment in which customers must manage and administer component systems separately.

• In 2011, a variety of broad trends are influencing the planning and deployment of enterprise contact center infrastructure, representing a change from a more conservative market seen in the prior publication of this Magic Quadrant document. Included among these trends are the following:

• Easing of technology acquisition budgets among enterprises and service providers as the global economy recovers from the economic downturn of 2008 and 2009.

• Infrastructure consolidation and centralization projects among companies that operate multiple contact centers. These companies increasingly are looking to leverage the location-independent nature of IP-based infrastructure to reduce duplication of infrastructure investments. In response to the interest in consolidation and centralization of infrastructure, most vendor solutions now support VMware or Hyper-V for system virtualization.

• Momentum for multichannel routing, including email response management, Web chat and customer collaboration solutions. These solutions, which have been traditionally purchased from best-of-breed or point solutions providers, are now increasingly being evaluated within the portfolio of the traditional automatic call distributor (ACD) vendors.

• Once almost solely limited to point-solution providers, many contact center infrastructure suites or portfolios include some level of contact center workforce optimization functionality. This functionality encompasses varying combinations of contact recording, agent evaluation, workforce management, coaching and e-learning tools, postcontact survey, and agent performance speech analytics.

• Increasing awareness of social media influences and the potential impact on contact center operations exists, although actual adoption of social CRM solutions in contact centers remains primarily limited to companies that take a more aggressive approach to technology adoption.

Many companies fitting a mainstream or conservative technology adoption profile have begun to embrace the use of multichannel customer communications, primarily in the form of adding email response management and in some cases, Web chat functionality, to their environments. Meanwhile, those with more aggressive technology adoption profiles have begun to embrace rich presence to incorporate subject-matter experts directly into customer service processes. Technologies such as video and desktop collaboration with customers remain niche functionalities in contact center infrastructure, with limited and specialized commercial deployment. Regardless of a company's particular technology adoption profile, companies should review Gartner's "Hype Cycle for Contact Center Infrastructure, 2010" to help develop a road map for the ways that new technologies should be brought into their respective environments to address customer relationship strategies. In some cases, this may involve evaluating the ability of a system to provide a wide breadth of functionality, not all of which may be implemented at the time of the system's initial deployment.

The contact center infrastructure market showed strong signs of recovery as the global economy rebounded from the economic downturn of 2008 and 2009, showing an overall growth in agent shipments of 12.0% compared with 2009. Market growth rates varied significantly by region, however, with growth being led by the Asia/Pacific and the Middle East and Africa regions, which both showed year-over-year growth rates of nearly 40%. Most other markets showed single-digit year-over-year growth rates; however, the Japanese market showed a 15.0% decline in agent shipments as compared with 2009. Growth in agent shipments in 2010 was fueled by a pent-up demand for contact center investments following sharp declines in shipments experienced during the depths of the global economic downturn. The addressing of pent-up demand was largely driven by an easing of budget constraints among contact center buyers and by IT departments in general as the global economy and general business climate improved. The two largest markets globally are North America and Western Europe. These markets are also the two most-mature markets, where a significant portion of contact center infrastructure sales are replacements of existing systems, typically when technology refresh cycles come around. In these markets, the pent-up demand included end-user investments to refresh outdated software releases of existing investments that were no longer at levels supported by the manufacturer back up to supported release levels. In less mature markets, pent-up demand primarily took the form of requirements for new contact center infrastructure purchases that had been deferred during the economic downturn.

Gartner defines contact center infrastructure as the products (equipment, software and services) needed to operate call centers for basic telephony support and contact centers for multichannel support. 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 communication operations.

Contact center interactions can be people-assisted or automated self-service, using IVR and speech recognition technologies, for example. These channels for interaction use both live agents and messaging technology and include voice, Web, email, instant messaging, Web chat, video and mobile devices.

Contact center infrastructure includes a wide range of related technologies, such as:

• Telephony infrastructure

• Multimedia contact routing and prioritization engines

• 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 (CTI)/Web service interfaces

• Email response management

• Web chat

• Collaborative browsing

• Live and prerecorded video

• Knowledge-base self-service

• Workforce optimization tools including contact center workforce management, session recording and e-learning

• Workflow routing and management

Contact centers require a wide range of functions, architectures, features and services to be effective. Three major architectural approaches that are common in the market are best-of-breed components, all-in-one bundled suites and service-based solutions. They are offered in the form of time division multiplexing (TDM) circuit-switched solutions, IP-based solutions (including SIP-based solutions) and as hybrids of the two.

Increasingly, contact center managers prefer to purchase much, or all, of their contact center infrastructure from a single source in the pursuit of easier and enduring integration. Therefore, leading contact center infrastructure vendors offering complete portfolios of solutions, comprising their own products and those of partners and other strategic suppliers, are being favored. A fourth architectural approach, that of hosted, multitenant systems (also known as contact center as a service [CCaaS]) is still an emerging alternative and not yet widely deployed in the market, but is gaining attention as cloud approaches increase. There are not any CCaaS providers that offer a substantial-enough global presence to warrant inclusion in this document. Coverage of the CCaaS space is provided in other Gartner documents including "SaaS-Based Contact Center Infrastructure: Four Questions Key to the Selection Process," and "Critical Elements of Cloud-Based Contact Center Services: Pricing, Service-Level Agreements and Service Integration,"

To appear in this Magic Quadrant, vendors had to show all the following capabilities:

• Market share among the top performers in at least one geographic region or, failing that, sufficient differentiation to obtain market presence

• Sufficient sales and operational presence to support their market objectives

• Demonstrable solutions in most of the contact center infrastructure portfolio areas defined earlier

• Evidence of an ability to generate significant interest from leading client segments

Two vendors, Vocalcom and ZTE, have been added this year because both have achieved a significant level of adoption in their main geographic markets, as well as significantly increased their global presence while offering a broad suite of contact center functionality.

Genesys, which previously operated as a separate business unit within Alcatel-Lucent, has now merged product development, sales and marketing activities with the parent company. As such, the company is now listed as "Alcatel-Lucent (Genesys)" for clarity purposes.

CosmoCom was acquired by and merged with Syntellect, and is now listed as "Syntellect (CosmoCom)" for clarity purposes.

Oracle has ceased selling its "Oracle On Demand" contact center offering as a premises-based system and now only offers it as a SaaS-based solution. This document does not cover SaaS contact center offerings because they are covered in other Gartner research, and as such, Oracle has been dropped from this Magic Quadrant.

Gartner analysts evaluate contact center infrastructure technology providers based on the breadth, quality and overall breadth and maturity of their applications, customer support capabilities and ability to deliver solutions that enable contact center operations in formal contact centers in companies, outsourcers, and/or service providers. Ultimately, contact center infrastructure technology providers are judged on their ability and success in capitalizing on their vision (see Table 1).

Gartner analysts evaluate contact center infrastructure 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 marketplace. Ultimately, contact center infrastructure technology providers are rated on their understanding of how market forces can be exploited to create opportunities for providers and their clients (see Table 2).

Leaders are high-viability vendors with broad portfolios, significant market shares, broad geographic coverage, a clear vision of how contact center needs will evolve and a proven track record of delivering contact center products. 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 present relatively low risk.

Challengers are vendors with strong market capabilities and good solutions for specific markets. However, overall, their products lack the breadth and depth of those of 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 the Leaders. Vendors in this quadrant often excel at selling contact center functionality to their installed base of private branch exchanges (PBXs) or IP telephony.

Visionaries demonstrate a clear understanding of the contact center market and provide key innovations that point to the market's future. However, these vendors 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.

The vendors in this quadrant 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.

Consider Solidus eCare when already committed to Aastra's MX-ONE telephony platform or Solidus eCare Lite for up to 50 agents on the Aastra 700 switch. Aastra's offerings are well-suited for users who want telephony and mulitchannel suite-oriented contact center solutions from a single source and for those who need to integrate mobile phones into the solution.

• Aastra's Solidus eCare platform scales from small to large contact center environments, although it is best fit for small to midsize environments. It provides multimedia contact functionality on Aastra's MX-ONE and Aastra 700 platforms, and has become the common contact routing offering across the company's various enterprise telephony offerings over the course of 2010 and 2011.

• Aastra has a large installed base of telephony users around the world (albeit concentrated in Europe) following a number of acquisitions, including the 2008 acquisition of Ericsson's enterprise communications division.

• Aastra highlights the ease of management of its Solidus eCare offerings and claims that the solution requires fewer IT resources to maintain than similar configurations from other vendors, although prospective users of the offerings should check with local references for configurations that closely match their own.

• Although the company has centralized development and marketing for contact center around its Solidus eCare product line for enterprise contact center, it lacks some key capabilities, such as predictive dialing, agent workforce optimization (although it bundles in a license for TeleOpti's workforce management offering) and VoiceXML for IVR development.

• Solidus eCare's penetration of Aastra's own PBX/IP-PBX installed base (which is fragmented, resulting from a series of acquisitions) is limited and this product is not widely used outside of the company's enterprise telephony base.

• Limited sales channels for Solidus eCare mean that the market's awareness of this product is low.

• The company's limited presence in North America, the largest contact center market globally, as well as in emerging markets including Latin America and Asia, hampers its ability to grow and makes it challenging for some multinational companies to deploy a global solution.

The Genesys contact center business unit, which had previously been operated independently from parent company Alcatel-Lucent's (ALU's) contact center business, has been subsumed into Alcatel-Lucent's enterprise business units, and its product development, sales and marketing operations have been combined. The Genesys name now exists only as a brand for ALU's contact center solutions. Consider ALU's Customer interaction Management (CIM) platform and related offerings when looking to support large, complex contact centers including those that require significant customization to address differentiated customer service needs. CIM should also be considered when there is a requirement to integrate with multiple PBX/IP telephony environments or when separating contact center and PBX decisions because it is telephony vendor-agnostic. ALU also offers its Genesys Express offering for midsize contact centers needing multichannel functionality with integration capabilities across a variety of vendors' telephony environments, a migration path to the Genesys enterprise contact center offering set, or when needing to integrate to other Genesys contact center components such as Genesys Voice Portal, Intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) or Social Engagement. For midmarket contact centers that are committed to ALU's OmniPBX-Enterprise (OXE) telephony line and do not need access to other Genesys contact center components, the company also offers its Genesys Compact Edition for those needing multichannel functionality, as well as its OmniTouch Standard Edition for those needing only voice functionality and do not foresee ever needing to support integrated, multichannel customer contacts.

• ALU's Genesys CIM platform and other components of its contact center portfolio support a broad suite of highly scalable and fully featured contact center infrastructure applications. These include call and multimedia routing, network-level routing, voice response, contact recording and outbound dialing, workforce management and analytics. Customers report that version 8.0 software provides strong integration across the application suite, using consistent management, administration, and reporting systems and tools.

• The company has a strong vision for decoupling contact center applications from telephony infrastructure and for extending contact center capabilities into unified communications environments and enterprise workflow beyond the contact center, and for integration of social-media-based communications into structured contact center activities.

• Genesys can provide strong consulting and system integration services either directly or through its professional services partners. Genesys has a good ability to support global customers. As a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent, it has stronger financial backing than do most other vendors' solutions that are not linked to the sale of a particular vendor's telephony infrastructure.

• Genesys is now fully integrated into ALU's Enterprise business unit. Genesys' shipments of contact center agents was flat in 2010 compared with 2009 while most of the rest of the market grew; however, the business unit appears poised to resume growth in 2011 as sales efforts have largely overcome the initial hurdles of integrating operations with the rest of ALU's Enterprise business unit.

• Genesys is now fully integrated into ALU's Enterprise business unit, and its development organization is merged with both ALU's enterprise and carrier development organizations. Genesys' shipments of contact center agents was flat in 2010 compared with 2009 while most of the rest of the market grew; however, the business unit appears poised to resume growth in 2011 as sales efforts have largely overcome the initial hurdles of integrating with the rest of ALU Enterprise. Widespread industry speculation regarding the potential sale of ALU's Enterprise business adds significant uncertainty to the future of the Genesys contact center offerings. Buyers must evaluate ALU's position and feel comfortable both with the Genesys product offerings and the long-term commitment to continue to develop and support those offerings.

• The Genesys CIM solutions are often more costly and customized to a user's particular environment than those of competitors and are often not as cost-effective, as well as being too complex to deploy and manage for small and midsize contact center deployments.

• ALU's Genesys offerings comprise several base contact center offerings with varying abilities to scale, to support mulitchannel functionality, and to integrate to other Genesys offerings. The disjointed offering set limits customers' ability to scale seamlessly across the product set, and may require customers to make near-term platform choices that may limit their ability to address long-term needs.

Consider Altitude uCI if you require a suite-based solution set and you have access to certified integrators on Altitude uCI. Altitude solutions should also be considered if you require multivendor telephony integration or are replacing your incumbent telephony infrastructure vendor and want to separate the timing of your contact center and telephony investment decisions.

• Altitude uCI is a software-based contact center application suite offering broad functionality and interoperability with PBX and IP-PBX infrastructure from leading vendors. Altitude also offers its own SIP-based Altitude vBox, which uses the Asterisk open-source communications platform.

• Altitude uCI offers a competitively priced range of applications, including multichannel inbound and outbound capabilities, voice self-service, call recording and workforce optimization, with particular strengths in scripting, knowledgebase and integrated desktop tools.

• Although Altitude solutions sell into a breadth of contact center environments, they are especially well-adopted among contact center business process outsourcers (BPOs) offering outbound communications, particularly those requiring dialer technology to serve the debt collections market.

• Altitude market presence is primarily concentrated in Europe and Latin America (primarily in Brazil), particularly among contact center business process outsourcers.

• Altitude has limited market presence and awareness globally, and has limited resources for rapidly increasing awareness of its brand.

• Altitude's increasing focus on meeting the needs of the outsourcing market distracts the company from more aggressively targeting enterprise contact center environments.

• Altitude's ability to provide solutions to multinational companies outside the European and Latin American markets is limited.

Consider Aspect when looking for a unified contact center application suite for midsize to large size implementations, including several best-of-breed applications, or when looking for an offering targeting small to midsize contact centers closely tied to Microsoft's Lync unified communications offering. Additionally, consider Aspect when needing to integrate with multiple PBX/IP telephony environments or when separating the timing of contact center and telephony investment decisions.

• The unified architecture of Aspect's Unified IP products provides common application development, management and reporting tools. They incorporate the company's best-of-breed technology, including call and multimedia routing, an IVR/voice portal, outbound dialing, agent workforce management and unified communications for applications such as "Ask an Expert." Users can manage multiple sites or workgroups through a unified command and control interface, which can also be extended to support the company's "signature" (legacy) contact center platforms.

• Aspect's Contact 2011 provides an offering that supports installations with fewer than 100 agents and uses Microsoft Lync as its media server, leveraging Lync's unified communications capabilities to support multichannel functionality. Currently available only through Aspect, the company plans to make the offering available through Microsoft channel partners as well later in 2011.

• Aspect's considerable experience in contact center products and markets can be helpful to companies with complex requirements. Aspect also has good global reach for sales and support.

• Aspect traditionally charges premium pricing for ongoing maintenance services, but its services team has received varied reviews from Gartner clients for several years in succession. Aspect customers and prospects must evaluate the impact of this pricing on the solution's total cost of ownership and check references to validate that the service team's skill level is commensurate with the service pricing.

• The company lacks an enterprise PBX/IP-PBX installed base of its own into which to sell its products. As such and in the light of the lack of "greenfield" opportunities for large contact centers in North American and Western European, Aspect must attempt to sell into the installed bases of other vendors, which can be a challenging task.

• Aspect's financial performance is solid as it positions itself for an initial public offering (IPO) of company stock in the near future, although the company is not growing its installed base aggressively. In an industry undergoing consolidation, the lack of growth in its installed base may affect Aspect's revenue streams in the long term.

Following Avaya's acquisition of Nortel in December 2009, the company announced its product evolution road map, combining elements of its heritage Avaya and Nortel product families into a new, consolidated architecture in Avaya Aura Contact Center. Consider the heritage Avaya Aura Call Center Elite for midsize to large telephony-oriented call centers, and Avaya Aura Contact Center for midsize to large multichannel contact center environments, or to add multichannel capabilities to existing or new Avaya Aura Call Center Elite deployments. Both offering sets include several best-of-breed applications for contact center environments with complex customer service requirements, particularly when using heritage Avaya telephony solutions. Heritage Nortel CC6 or CC7 customers should evaluate whether and when to update their infrastructure to current release levels of Avaya Aura Contact Center.

• Avaya is moving steadily along its road map for delivering a comprehensive multimedia contact center suite using a single, cohesive architecture. Users have the flexibility to meter the pace of their adoption of the new architecture based on business and functionality drivers to upgrade, including cost of migration issues as well as the customer's desire to be an early adopter of the new architecture as opposed to a mainstream or late adopter.

• Avaya has a strong vision for leveraging its Agile Communications Enablement (ACE) platform to extend consistent customer service delivery models across a variety of customer interaction domains, whether inside or outside the traditional, structured contact center environment, and across a variety of vendors' communication and collaboration solution sets.

• With the acquisition of Nortel, Avaya now holds the top market share position in contact center routing in terms of end-user revenue and agent shipments across all geographies globally. This provides the stability associated with strong product and service revenue and a large installed base into which additional products and services can be sold.

• Avaya and Nortel customers and prospects must ensure that they are sufficiently confident that the company's announced product road map adds sufficient value to warrant continued investment in its evolutionary path. Potential buyers must also evaluate the stability of the platform and the skills of their Avaya channel partner to deliver reliable solutions in this rapidly evolving technology environment.

• Gartner hears increasing dissatisfaction among heritage Nortel customers, indicating that support quality has declined since the merging of the two companies. Customers cite concerns regarding the skill level of Avaya's upper-level engineers.

• Avaya has expanded its sales channel coverage with the acquisition of Nortel, but many heritage Nortel channel partners lack contact center applications expertise. Customers and prospects must check references from the combined base of channel partners to ensure that the partner has a track record for installing and supporting solutions that match their own environment.

Companies that are committed to Cisco's Unified Communications Manager or that want an end-to-end Cisco infrastructure should consider Cisco's contact center offerings.

• Cisco's Unified Contact Center portfolio supports a broad set of functionality, including call and multimedia routing, network-level routing, IVR/voice portal and outbound dialing.

• Cisco continues to deliver product enhancements that support traditional contact center functionality, such as improvements in its reporting tools, as well as delivering more advanced capabilities such as routing social media contacts and open agent desktop tools.

• Cisco's strong brand recognition and respect among IT decision makers and influencers and its broad global reach has enabled it to grow market share, often at the expense of more established players in the market.

• Several of Cisco's key channel partners have strong contact center consulting and system integration skills to deliver highly customized and complex contact center solutions.

• Cisco's Contact Center Enterprise and Express products tend to be sold into environments using the company's data communications network and telephony solutions. Cisco's Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise offering can support integration to third-party telephony environments, but is frequently too expensive and underfeatured for most enterprise contact center environments and is typically installed as a "steppingstone" to the company's traditional enterprise contact center products.

• Although Cisco's Unified Contact Center Express product supports a tightly bundled application suite scaling up to 400 agents, the company does not offer an all-in-one contact center application suite capable of scaling to large-enterprise sizes.

• The company continues to close the "feature gap" between itself and its competitors, but some Cisco contact center capabilities, including those involving system management and administration tools, are less feature-rich than those of vendors with a long history of selling contact centers.

Consider Huawei for deployments in China and in developing economies in Asia/Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa, where its carrier and large-enterprise business resources are significant enough to provide capable support, either directly or through channel partners.

• Huawei offers a broad suite of contact center offerings with which telcos can host solutions for enterprises or that can be deployed on customers' premises. They are founded on the company's UAP (IP-based/enabled PBX with ACD), ICD (CTI and contact center applications server including IVR, dialer, Web channels, multichannel recording and more), ISE (integrative information system), CSP (customer service/CRM platform), and IPCC (IP contact center solution offering an integrated application suite) platforms.

• Huawei's IP switching solutions (UAP8100 for carriers and large enterprises, and UAP3300/2100 and UAP6600 for midsize enterprises) support virtual call center, network call center, Web-enabled contact center and multimedia access channels in contact center operations.

• Huawei recently established an enterprise-focused division of the company, which includes the contact center business unit. This organizational move should improve the company's ability to develop and deliver enterprise contact center solutions globally over time.

• In addition to its strength in the China market, Huawei is focusing both its carrier and enterprise contact center sales efforts in emerging economies globally and is well-recognized in Latin America and Africa. In these markets, the company highlights its ability to sell an entire enterprise voice and data solution, on-premises or from a cloud, similar to the strategy employed by Cisco globally.

• Huawei currently has limited ability to provide enterprise contact center solutions outside of China, South Africa and parts of Latin America. This limits its ability to support some global multinational customers.

• Huawei lacks brand recognition in the contact center market and has yet to show a track record for focusing on enterprise contact centers, particularly in the largest global markets of North America and Western Europe.

• Huawei is aggressively working to evolve its sales strategy away from direct sales and telco service provider sales, and toward channel-partner-driven sales. It can be difficult to find channel partners with contact center skills, especially in emerging economies.

Consider Interactive Intelligence when looking for an all-in-one suite of tightly integrated contact center applications across a wide range of scalability requirements. This includes environments that contain multiple PBX and/or IP-PBX vendors, or when enterprises want to separate timing of their contact center and telephony investment decisions.

• Interactive Intelligence's Customer Interaction Center contact center suite uses Web services and provides a common set of application development, management and reporting tools across a range of its applications.

• Interactive Intelligence continues to compete successfully for midsize and large contact center deals. The company is improving its brand recognition in North America and has begun to increase its sales and marketing footprint globally.

• Interactive Intelligence is finding success in selling its hosted and hybrid on-premises and hosted solutions in enterprises of various sizes. The company is finding its strongest adoption of its hosted offerings in the United States, although it is also offered through additional data centers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa region, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

• Customer Interaction Center's efficient use of server resources and consistent administrative and management tools across applications makes the system particularly appealing to IT decision makers.

• Despite making investments in its sales channel program to support enterprises outside North America, the company does not match the global coverage provided by some of its larger competitors. Companies should evaluate the ability of Interactive Intelligence and its channel partners to meet their needs in relevant geographies.

• Some of Interactive Intelligence's contact center applications are less feature-rich than competitive best-of-breed offerings.

• Not all of Interactive Intelligence's channel partners are strong in contact center environments. Prospects should check channel partner references for environments that match their scalability and complexity needs, and verify that support resources have been trained and certified on current product releases.

Consider Mitel when looking for contact center solutions for small and midsize deployments associated with Mitel Communications Director telephony environments.

• Mitel's Contact Center Solutions (CCS) Enterprise Edition supports a broad suite of contact center infrastructure applications, including call and multimedia routing, voice response, outbound dialing, call recording and workforce management. The Business Edition of its product offers a subset of the features available in the CCS Enterprise Edition, targeting contact centers with 25 or fewer agents.

• Mitel has recently increased the scalability of its CCS Enterprise Edition to better address the midsize- and large-enterprise markets and reports that it has several customers supporting more than 1,000 concurrent agents..

• Mitel has a strong network of channel partners, particularly for small and midsize enterprises in North America.

• Mitel offers strong integration with Microsoft communications products and can deliver combined solutions to midsize contact center environments through channel partners certified to deliver both product sets.

• Mitel has recently reorganized its business to better target midsize-enterprise opportunities, including an increased focus on sales to SMBs through channel partners. This change in focus is likely to negatively impact the company's ability to execute on sales and service in the near term as channel and organizational issues get worked out.

• Mitel has limited ability to support large contact center environments and customers with multinational requirements. The company has limited market presence and awareness globally and lacks the financial resources for rapidly increasing awareness of its brand.

• Not all of Mitel's channel partners are skilled in contact center deployments. Prospective customers should check local references.

• Mitel's contact center sales are primarily limited to Mitel telephony environments.

Consider NEC when using or evaluating NEC telephony infrastructure and where contact center scalability needs are stable and unlikely to require migration across product lines within the NEC portfolio. NEC sells into multiple countries as its market focus rather than globally.

• NEC's UNIVERGE UC&C Contact Center offering for midsize and large contact center environments provides a unified suite of contact center capabilities and integrates tightly with the company's Unified Communications for Enterprise offering.

• NEC has a large installed base of PBXs and contact centers in which to sell additional contact center products and services.

• The recently introduced UNIVERGE UC&C Contact Center offering can leverage existing investments in legacy NEC contact center solutions or provided a well-integrated contact center applications stack for new deployments.

• Multiple contact routing products for different company sizes and geographies limit NEC's ability to support multinational companies with a cohesive contact center product set worldwide.

• NEC's contact center sales are primarily limited to NEC telephony environments.

• NEC operates in particular country markets in Asia/Pacific and North America but has a low profile in Europe and elsewhere.

Consider SAP Business Communications Management (SAP BCM) when looking for highly scalable and/or multitenant all-in-one application suites solutions, especially when your organization is committed to SAP enterprise applications.

• SAP BCM is an all-in-one software suite that includes multichannel inbound, outbound, IVR, call-recording and quality-monitoring capabilities, and strong integration with mobile devices.

• BCM can be run as a stand-alone solution or integrated with other SAP enterprise software products and supports interoperability with PBX and IP-PBX infrastructure from leading vendors.

• BCM is growing its market presence in Western Europe and North America, and is increasing SAP's ability and experience in supporting the solution for global customers.

• BCM represents a very small portion of SAP's overall revenue stream and it continues to be challenging for the BCM sales and marketing team to gain and maintain awareness among SAP's sales force to mine the large and lucrative SAP enterprise software customer base more easily. This makes it more difficult for the BCM group to grow the business and show the financial contributions that will, in turn, help to increase awareness of the business unit within the larger SAP organization.

• BCM lacks brand awareness in the contact center infrastructure market, making it more challenging to penetrate enterprises that do not have an existing SAP investment. This further challenges the BCM group within SAP to grow the business in a way that will accelerate SAP's investment in growing that portion of the business.

• In many customer environments, purchasing decisions for contact center infrastructure and enterprise application software are made by separate groups — particularly in large enterprises. This can increase the complexity of the selling environment within accounts and limit the long-term benefits of SAP's integrated solution within an enterprise.

Consider Siemens when looking for well-featured contact center applications running in existing or potential Siemens telephony and unified communications environments, including those requiring multisite and multinational deployments.

• Siemens Enterprise Communications' (SEN's) Openscape Contact Center (OSCC) offering is a well-integrated multichannel contact center application suite. SEN continues to fill out functionality within the suite, including the recent additions of its own IVR, dialer and workforce optimization capabilities to complement more advanced functionality available through its partners.

• SEN has a good vision for extending its OSCC capabilities into unified communications environments.

• After several years of lackluster performance following the spin-off of SEN from parent company Siemens AG, followed by declining sales industrywide associated with the global economic downturn in 2008 and 2009, SEN appears to be regaining some momentum in the contact center space. This includes improved sales performance in 2010, as well as a renewed focus on product development and investment in growing brand awareness.

• Siemens has strongly pursued openness through its development of a service-oriented architecture environment. Siemens also employs an all-software approach, including the underlying OpenScape Voice switching/softswitch environment.

• Despite Siemens' recent refocusing on its contact center business, the company still struggles to overcome a legacy association with technically strong, but undermarketed solutions. This continues to result in Siemens sometimes not even being considered for a number of large contact center opportunities — even within its own installed base of telephony users.

• Although SEN has expanded OSCC's functionality and scalability, the offering does not address the needs of very large or highly customized contact center environments. As a result, SEN will resell Alcatel-Lucent's Genesys CIM and related offerings to address these customer environments.

• The company sells primarily to Siemens PBX/IP-PBX environments.

Consider Syntellect's CosmoCom offering when looking to support large, multisite, virtualized contact centers, as well as shared centralized infrastructure, while still allowing management control at departmental or group level. Consider Syntellect's Customer Interaction Management (CIM) offering when looking for a multichannel contact center routing solution that can leverage a variety of IP-PBX infrastructure environments.

• Syntellect's CosmoCom offering comprises a broad suite of highly scalable and fully featured contact center infrastructure applications, including call and multimedia routing, contact recording and outbound dialing, and is commonly sold into service provider environments.

• The company's CIM offering targets midsize to large contact center environments, providing a tightly integrated multichannel contact center application suite that uses a CTI integration to existing PBX investments to leverage existing telephony investments. This offering has its strongest regional presence in North America, with increasing growth in Western Europe.

• The CosmoCom unified contact center application suite uses Web services and provides a common set of application development, management and reporting tools for a range of applications.

• The CosmoCom offerings particularly suit large-scale, multitenant enterprises, hosted or service provider environments. The company's strongest regional presence is in the EMEA region, particularly among telcos and cable operators, with a growing presence in North America and Asia/Pacific.

• Neither Syntellect nor CosmoCom have significant brand recognition. Although the company wishes to use Syntellect to pull its CosmoCom offerings into North America, and to use its CosmoCom market presence to pull CIM into other geographies, there is no guarantee that either effort will be successful, and the company risks losing focus on doing either effort well.

• Syntellect offers two very separate and distinct contact center infrastructure offerings and must now work through the process of looking for and operationalizing synergies in product development, sales, customer support, and marketing. Such efforts often result in near-term missteps in many areas.

• Syntellect's lack of a cohesive product line across all geographies makes it difficult for the company to meet the needs of large global enterprises.

Consider Vocalcom if your enterprise requires a suite-based solution set and if you require multivendor telephony integration, or are replacing your incumbent telephony infrastructure vendor and want to separate the timing of your contact center and telephony investment decisions.

• Vocalcom's Hermes.Net offers a tightly integrated suite of applications, including multichannel routing, IVR and call recording, with particular strengths in predictive dialing and agent desktop and scripting tools.

• Vocalcom offers its own IP-PBX functionality through its OnXmedia offering or can integrate with telephony solutions from other leading vendors.

• Vocalcom's market presence is primarily concentrated in Western Europe and the Middle East and Africa, with particular strength in France and Spain.

• Vocalcom has limited market presence and awareness globally, and has yet to show a marketing track record of increasing awareness of its brand.

• Vocalcom's focus on meeting the needs of the outsourcing market and particularly those focused on outbound services distracts the company from more aggressively targeting enterprise contact center environments.

• Vocalcom has limited ability to provide solutions to multinational companies outside the European and the Middle East and African markets.

Consider ZTE for deployments in China and in emerging economies where its carrier and large-enterprise business resources are significant enough to provide capable support, either directly or through channel partners.

• ZTE's NGCC contact center suite offers a breadth of contact center offerings with which telcos can host solutions for enterprises or that can be deployed on customer premises.

• In addition to its strength in the Chinese market, ZTE is growing its sales of its NGCC offering in emerging markets globally.

• Although ZTE has a limited number of enterprise customer premises deployments, the company's strength in the contact center space is in selling NGCC as a platform, which allows telcos to offer hosted services for enterprises and outsourcers.

• ZTE has limited ability and experience in providing enterprise contact center solutions outside of China and parts of the Middle East and Africa, limiting its ability to meet the needs of global enterprise customers.

• ZTE lacks brand recognition in the contact center market and has yet to show a track record for focusing on enterprise contact centers, particularly in the largest global markets of North America and Western Europe.

• ZTE often uses a sell-through sales model in which it sells NGCC to telcos, which in turn sell or host NGCC for enterprises. It can be difficult to find telcos with a strong understanding of the dynamics of contact center environments, particularly in emerging economies.