Traditional contact center infrastructure vendors face few greenfield opportunities in the large enterprise market in mature geographies. A recent report by Datamonitor states that IP contact center vendors have begun to offer unified product lines, aiming for common administration and reporting, common user interfaces and functionality far beyond basic routing.

The report “Decision Matrix – Selecting an IP Contact Center Vendor,” suggests that has caused vendors to change their sales and marketing strategies, focusing much less on the benefits of the transition from time division multiplexing (TDM) to internet protocol (IP) and much more on topics such as unified communications (UC) for the contact center and ways to connect the enterprise with the branch and the contact center.

An IP contact center is any contact center that does not use traditional circuit switching; that is, all calls are voice-over-IP or are converted from TDM to IP. An IP contact center leverages the intrinsic benefits of IP communications, including the fact that either one or both voice and data communications can be efficiently routed to any customer service agent with access to an IP connection.

“In order to offset markedly slower growth in the their traditional stronghold of the large enterprise market, IPCC vendors that had traditionally sold technology for very large contact centers will continue to try to find ways to package and sell products for smaller customers,” says Ian Jacobs, senior analyst for customer interaction technologies at Datamonitor and the report’s author.

“This means increased competition for companies that have already created small and mid-sized enterprise products. It also means increased competition for technologically and business process-savvy channel partners from which smaller companies typically buy such products.”