China's Huawei is known mostly for its telecoms infrastructure, but it has also emerged as one of Asia’s most important contact center vendors. Its release of a cloud-based system, the eSpace Cloud Contact Center solution, raises the question of what it would take for Huawei to muscle its way into the first rank of global contact center infrastructure vendors.
Leaving aside political considerations (particularly security and protectionism), Huawei can choose from three pathways to establish itself as a strong, global contact center competitor. These are:
the purchase of an established western vendor direct investment in sales and marketing to capture customers in the mature markets of North America and Western Europe aggressive expansion across the global emerging consumer markets, where contact center growth will be quicker than in the West. Ovum believes that the company will concentrate on the third option to grow its contact center profile.
Scenario 1: Buy into an existing vendor
Huawei has two distinct contact center product lines, one aimed at telecoms carriers and one at enterprises. The eSpace cloud system comes out of the enterprise division, but is said to be designed on the same core technology infrastructure as the company’s IP Contact Center (IPCC) solution, which is built for carriers.
Both IPCC and eSpace are sold worldwide, with the majority of deployments in China and many of the rest in emerging contact center markets. IPCC is running at 2,000 sites with a combined 150,000 agents.
From a networking and scalability point of view, Huawei clearly has the capability to provision high-volume, high-criticality contact centers, and to do it with technology that includes state-of-the-art applications such as multimedia call routing, self-service, and workforce optimization.
The offering that is available is as sophisticated as those available in the mature North American and European markets. With a dedicated cloud offering, Huawei is feature-positioned to compete with Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, and other established vendors.