BPO CTI: For Peace of Mind

Market Information
The Indian CTI market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 50.6 percent during 2002–09. According to Frost & Sullivan, the CTI market stood at $1.6 million during 2002 and is estimated to be in the range of $4.3 million during 2003. With greater adoption of technologies by call centers, the trend is clearly towards buying the entire suite of applications to integrate the seats with CTI.

The CTI industry in India is highly fragmented, with many players. Chief amongst which are: Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, Aspect, Crompton Greaves, Genesys, Servion, and Parsec. Avaya and Nortel continue to dominate the market, bundling CTI as part of their total call-center solutions.

The market trend is also moving towards buying total solutions with CTI being bundled with ACD, outbound dialing, IVR, and multimedia—rather than buying point solutions.

Cisco, Concerto, Parsec, Interactive Intelligence, and Servion offer solutions on the soft switch. Parsec and Servion did well in the Indian market; bagging deals in the government, telecom, and financial sectors. Cisco has made steady headway with IP-based contact-center solutions while new players like Concerto Software have also ingressed into the market by bagging total-solution deals. The average price for a low-end CTI software stands at $220 per agent seat.

Experts Panel

Ajoy Dasgupta, DGM, Siemens Information Systems

Dilip Kumar, regional director, Indian Subcontinent, Datacraft India

DJ Dutta, country head, sales and marketing, Parsec Technologies Ltd

SK Jha, managing director (India and SAARC), 3D Networks

Vivek Singh, business development manager (India and Saarc), ITES-BPO, Cisco