There is a strong trend toward moving to IP as a platform for deployment of contact center solutions for various business benefits.

Strategic outsourcing has caught momentum in the ?Indian market and most organizations especially in the telecom and BFSI space are outsourcing IT operations which also in most cases are beginning to include contact center operations. The established players are into a consolidation and optimization phase in terms of contact center technology deployments to align with business needs of the enterprise.

On key growth drivers

The various factors that drive growth in the contact center solutions market are:

• Growth of the service industry
• Replacement of ageing contact center deployments (TDM call centers)
• Limitations of existing contact centers
• Lowering cost of operations, IP transport, and evolution of reliable IP networks.

On market and technology trends

There is strong trend toward moving to IP as a platform for deployment of contact center solutions for various business benefits viz:

• Integration of the contact with the enterprise (subject matter experts)
• Addition of video as value added contact channel with 3G services being launched
• Evolution of managed and hosted services for contact center as compared to CAPEX investments
• Lower cost of transport with IP as medium of transport
• Enterprise-wide contact centers vis-à-vis disparate contact centers
• Virtualization of contact center resources
• Adoption of software as a service (SOA) architecture as the way forward
• Adoption of VXML self service to dynamically implement self-service solutions by using the power of the IP network

Impact of a 3 percent degrowth in global IT spending

The current global economic conditions have slowed the pace of expansion mainly in the international outsourcing business. However, the domestic call center market is still growing strongly especially in the telecom space with the addition of new cellular service providers.

Expansion plans and associated procurement plans for FY 2009-10?

Cisco has aggressive plans for growing its business in this area as this is one of our key focus areas for Cisco as an organization. We plan to increase our market share through increased focus on the service providers and BFSI customer by creating solutions catering to these specific segments. Cisco is also trying to launch innovative delivery models which are currently being created and fine tuned to suit the Indian market.

On the key demand verticals

Various verticals which have seen a growth in Cisco's contact center solutions are telecom, domestic outsourcers, banking, and finance.

On future trends

The Indian domestic call center market is evolving and maturing at a rapid rate and customers are now demanding solutions which are similar in scale and complexity comparable to the international BPO market. This is an opportunity as well as a challenge to the solution providers. The opportunity is of a huge market opening up that requires scalable and complex solutions, however the challenges are of solution costs as well as alternate business models.