The adoption of cloud computing by contact centres in SA is set to accelerate over the next five years.
This is according to Ishe Zingoni, Frost & Sullivan's ICT industry analyst, who was addressing ITWeb's Virtualisation and Cloud Computing Summit yesterday.
Zingoni said that, last year, the adoption of cloud computing by local call centres was in the development stage of the market cycle.
He pointed out that cloud adoption in SA is relatively low, adding that, even in developed markets, cloud computing has not seen the uptake initially expected.
Barriers to cloud adoption, according to Zingoni, include high investments businesses have already made in their on-premise solutions, security concerns, a perceived lack of control and a lack of understanding of the concept.
Locally, he says, cloud computing is gaining traction, with software as a service in the development phase of the market cycle, and infrastructure as a service seeing steady growth. Globally, Zingoni suggested that in the next five years, the cloud computing market will increase from $41 billion to $241 billion.
This year, the adoption of cloud computing by call centres will enter the growth phase, said Zingoni, adding that, in the next five years, hosted contact centres will account for 22% to 24% of call centres. This compares to 8% currently. According to Zingoni, this growth will be the result of contact centres moving to the cloud, and also the emergence of new contact centres, which will be hosted from the onset.
Zingoni explained that with the global economic slowdown, the growth of contact centre installations has stalled.
However, he added that hosted contact centres are gaining traction.
According to him, the drivers towards hosted solutions include a lowered total cost of ownership as well as the attractiveness of the opex model over the capex model. Zingoni added that cloud computing also offers users access to the latest technologies, and lets call centres provision agents remotely.
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