ITWeb/Aspect unified communications forum highlights UC benefits for BPO firms UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS offers huge growth potential to outsourcing companies, with some facets of the market, such as unified messaging, set to grow to a multibillion-dollar industry as a result of contact centre uptake.

This emerged at the recent unified communications forum hosted in Johannesburg by ITWeb and Aspect Software.

The senior vice-president of Aspect Software, Roger Sumner, highlighted the main purpose of unified communications in the contact centre - to reduce human latency in business processes.

ContactInGauteng CEO, Keryn House, highlighted some of the industry trends in the BPO market. According to the National BPO Quantification Survey for 2007/08, there are 1 362 call centres in South Africa and 911 of them are in Gauteng. House said call centres were thought to have generated between 60 000 and 80 000 jobs.

House added that ContactInGauteng is developing 22 hectares of ground into in a multifunctional BPO park in Hammanskraal, just outside Pretoria. ContactInGauteng is also working with the Gauteng Economic Development Agency to develop several BPO sites in Gauteng, the main being the Hammanskraal site.

LOOKING AHEAD

Frost & Sullivan analyst Corrie Froehlich gave an overview of unified communications implementations in South Africa, and some predictions for the industry as a whole. According to Froehlich, the unified messaging market could grow into a $60 million industry by 2013 and the key driver would be the contact centre industry. The unified messaging market, he explained, is a subset of the unified communications market and is an earlier version of the technology.

Froehlich also discussed the various web 2.0 applications that companies could implement to make contact centres more interactive. Some of the applications included using MMS technology to send through documents that would normally be faxed to the company.

MTN contact centre executive Karen Brits gave a brief yet interesting presentation on MTN Group`s contact centre and why it is considered "a leading provider of communications services".

"MTN has been using Aspect Spectrum since 1996 and even took part in the renaming process," Brits said. The contact centre executive added that MTN had 2 400 agents at their four physical sites located in Gauteng, Polokwane and KwaZulu-Natal. Outside of SA, MTN Uganda had 190 agents. Brits highlighted some of the needs that had arisen from the various locations of their BPOs, including the need for a disaster recovery system in volatile areas.

Besides the speakers, delegates also had the opportunity to engage the vendors that were present. These included Aspect Software and Microsoft Software, among others, and all were ready with unified communications solutions for the contact centre.