Frost & Sullivan names Intelleca IP services leader for 2007

Intelleca, South Africa's fastest growing voice and contact centre solutions provider, has won the 2007 Frost & Sullivan Award for Market Penetration Leadership in the South African hosted IP services market.

The award, given each year to the "company that has demonstrated excellence in capturing market share within its industry", was made to Intelleca for its work over the last 12 months in creating the hosted contact centre market.

Intelleca has done this with the CosmoCom Contact Centre on Demand suite of software, securing numerous clients, building credibility and thought leadership and showing ability to execute.

This is the third major industry acknowledgement Intelleca has earned for its work in creating the contact centre on demand (CCOD) market in South Africa: late last year it won the National Technical Innovation of the Year award at the National BPO awards held in Durban. Earlier it had won the Gauteng Technical Innovation of the Year award.

"The Frost & Sullivan award is important in that South Africa mirrors the international trend, whereby companies see the clear economic benefit in embracing a hosted managed services telco provisioned model for their voice services," says Grant Allan, business manager of managed services at Intelleca.

"Some companies have not felt comfortable handing over their operations, their infrastructure and sometimes their data for a third-party to manage off-site. We have created this market segment in South Africa and shown with a number of customers that it can be done with an optimal outcome, and this award endorses our approach."

Through this provisioning model, companies can still retain full system administration should they wish to, or alternatively out-task the function of administration if it is not core to their business.

Frost & Sullivan notes that Intelleca "has demonstrated strategic excellence in product innovation, marketing and sales strategies that have resulted in the largest gain market share over the past two to three years".

Intelleca's clients have enjoyed a number of direct business benefits, including cost savings of up to 40% through a "zero capital cost" model; access to the world's leading full-feature hosted call centre technology, without any initial investment costs or having to procure and own systems; the ability to take their contact centre costs off balance sheet, and defer them as a monthly opex cost; scale up or down quickly and easily, allowing companies to cope with inevitable peaks and troughs; and locate agents anywhere - in multiple venues, or even at home.

"We expect this market to continue growing at an accelerated pace," adds Allan. "Our customers are finding the technology delivers in accordance with their expectations, and they are steadily adding agent positions to existing environments. Adding credence to the business model is that the sales pipeline is healthy. In time we expect this model of service provisioning to become the market's preferred method for contact centre technology delivery. It makes sound business sense financially and strategically, and from our perspective we have the benefit of sustained annuity revenue."

Founded in 1961, Frost & Sullivan has 26 global offices, with more than 1 500 industry consultants, market research analysts, technology analysts and economists. It researches and analyses new market opportunities for corporate growth.