The market for CSS applications for the contact center is split into four major areas:

• Desktop tools to enhance agent capabilities: ATG, eGain, eGlue, InStranet, Kaidara, kana and Talisma
• Industry vertical solutions: Amdocs, Chordiant and Pegasystems
• Extensions of enterprise business applications: Microsoft, Oracle and SAP
• Software as a service (SaaS) and desktop productivity: Jacada, RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com

Microsoft Dynamics CRM, RightNow Technologies, Salesforce.com and a host of small vendors are at the forefront of a fragmented and still unstable market for customer service contact center solutions. A further wave of acquisitions will persist through 2008. There is still no business process platform for the customer service contact center (see "A Business Service Repository Provides the Foundation for a Business Process Platform") nor are the enterprise application suites appropriate as platforms for customer service business applications. Vendors such as Salesforce.com are using their ecosystems to create solutions made up of multiple vendors. No vendor has yet demonstrated this technology to date to integrate processes in an SaaS model, and it is not clear when or whether this technology and approach will be viable in the contact center.

The Role of SaaS or On-Demand vs. On-Premise Software

Through 2008, customer service capabilities delivered in the SaaS model (or applications on demand) will be the most prominent in the business-to-business (B2B), low-volume call/contact center. Software providers that have targeted this market, within whose definition the midsize enterprise also falls, must have an SaaS model to compete as visionaries (see "Software as a Service for Contact Center CRM: Limited but Promising"). For more-complex environments, SaaS is not yet an accepted standard nor will it be during the next three years. In our evaluations, we point out when we foresee a potential challenge for a product based on this qualification. By 2013, at least 75% of customer service centers will use a form of SaaS (0.7 probability). Through 2011, fewer than 10% of organizations will select SaaS for complex business process support (0.7 probability). Through 2008, SaaS offerings for the contact center will not serve high-volume and high-complexity processes (0.8 probability). Weigh the benefits of the SaaS model (faster time to deploy and, hence, time to benefit) against the rationale behind demonstrating a more specific total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis.

The desktop tools to enhance agent capabilities augment the contact center agent desktop. These vendors make key contributions to the customer service contact center space. The complexity of managing the customer's intentions and expectations in a cross-channel environment is straining the capabilities of core customer service applications and making the use of these agent-knowledge-augmentation solutions a critical feature in most contact centers.

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Prashanth Rai