According to an estimate, currently 22 per cent of the ACD revenues come from IP and rest from TDM. Earlier it was 10 per cent for IP and 90 per cent for TDM. The balance would continue to tilt in favor of IP. This would be largely because not only IP offers additional features and functionalities, it is also considered efficient in disaster recovery and that is why more and more companies (especially those from US with captive contact center units here) are going for distributed contact center models. Also the need for facilitating unified contact for customers who reach companies through multiple channels is driving the use of IP. Increasingly, e-mail and voice are getting integrated.

According to Frost & Sullivan, the leading three vendors and solution providers in the Indian market for call center hardware and software include Tata–Avaya, Lucent, and Servion Global. These have set up a number of call centers for various end-user sectors like telecom, banking and finance, outsource call centers, etc. Parsec has a growing server based call center solution business. This has made call center solutions accessible to smaller firms. Tata Telecom and Nortel also tend to bundle all the product offerings into one single solution. Migration from traditional ACDs to intelligent routing based on skill sets is a major trend in most telecom call centers.

According to the Interaction customer relationship management (CRM) market report by Frost & Sullivan, some key technology trends emerging in the contact center solutions market are:

• The move towards IP-based call centers is gaining momentum; some large-sized anchor deals are likely to happen over the next 2–4 years

• There will be a greater shift from traditional hardware systems towards having software-based applications

• The demand for mid-enterprise out-of-the-box applications is expected to be a big market for vendors

• ACD systems are increasingly taking the form of a layer of software as opposed to being hardware-based.

• Speech recognition will be the next generation of voice technology.

• The need to create a total call-blending atmosphere will see a surge in demand for CTI applications.

EXPERTS PANEL A Sethuraman, Director, Broadband Networking Division, Alcatel India Ajoy Dasgupta, head (CTI/call center solutions), Siemens Information Systems India Amit Mehta, national marketing manager (call center solutions), Tata Telecom Anand Awasthi, CEO, Avhan Technologies James D Foy, president and CEO, Concerto Software Jayesh Chitania, business development manager, Cisco Systems India & SAARC

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