The Aragon Research Globe™ for Intelligent Contact Centers, 2021

Data and AI Will Power Next-Generation Customer Experiences

Author: Jim Lundy July 15, 2021 | Research Note 2021-24

Video Producer: Adam Pease

Topic: Intelligent contact center

Issue: Who are the intelligent contact center providers and how will they evolve?

SUMMARY Key Findings: Aragon Research releases its third Aragon Research Globe™ for intelligent contact centers (ICCs). The ICC Prediction: By YE 2021, virtual agents (e.g., digital market is in the midst of consolidation as the demand for labor) will become a key feature of intelligent contact center offerings. This will force enterprises to do contact centers has grown during the pandemic. As planning for the ratio of human labor to digital labor. digital labor continues to grow, the 15 major vendors in this report are offering different levels of virtual agent Cost per Case Humans vs. Bots: capabilities. Virtual Agents: $1-$4 Human Agents: $15-$100

Prediction: By YE 2022, AI-based contact centers will be able to identify the real issue a customer is facing 50% faster than traditional approaches.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ...... 3 The Contact Center in a Post-Covid Economy ...... 3 Customer Experience and the Universal Customer Profile ...... 5 Omnichannel Communications—Voice, Email, Chat, and Video ...... 5 Key Trends Driving Digital Transformation ...... 6 Hybrid Cloud—Why Containerized Applications and Data Residency Matter ...... 6 Virtual Contact Center Comes of Age ...... 6 The Convergence of UCC and ICC—Better Together ...... 7 Building a Knowledge Base for ICC—Profiles and Graphs ...... 8 Knowledge Graphs, Sentiment, and Customer Data Platforms Will Power Advanced Analytics for Humans and Virtual Agents ...... 8 The Current State of Artificial Intelligence ...... 9 Deploying Virtual Agents Now ...... 10 Preparing for the Rise of Digital Labor ...... 11 Contact Center Feature Wars Give Way to More Use Cases ...... 11 Workforce Optimization—Integrated Vs. Best of Breed ...... 12 The Intelligent Contact Center Is Here ...... 12 Voice Analytics Go Realtime ...... 13 Conversational AI—Providers Go Their Own Way ...... 14 Virtual Agent Capabilities are a Must-Have for Modern Contact Centers ...... 14 The Increased Need for Profiles and Knowledge Repositories ...... 15 The Aragon Research Globe™ for Intelligent Contact Centers, 2021 ...... 17 Leaders ...... 18 Contenders ...... 25 Innovators ...... 31 Getting Started With ICC ...... 33 Aragon Advisory ...... 33 Bottom Line ...... 33 Dimensions of Analysis ...... 34 The Four Sectors of the Globe ...... 35 Inclusion Criteria ...... 36

Copyright © 2021 Aragon Research Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Aragon Research and the Aragon Research Globe are trademarks of Aragon Research Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. This publication may not be distributed in any form without Aragon Research’s prior written permission. The information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Nevertheless, Aragon Research provides this publication and the information contained in it "AS IS," without warranty of any kind. To the maximum extent allowed by law, Aragon Research expressly disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in such information. This publication consists of the opinions of Aragon Research and Advisory Services organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. The opinions expressed here-in are subject to change without notice. Although Aragon Research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Aragon Research does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Aragon Research is a private company and its clients may include firms or financial institutions that have financial interests in entities covered by Aragon Research. Further information about the objectivity of Aragon Research can be found at aragonresearch.com Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Introduction

If there was any doubt about the strategic importance of contact centers, that doubt went away during the pandemic. Many contact center providers were able to react quickly to provide enhanced services, including virtual agent capabilities for remote contact center associates.

While demand for cloud contact centers is at an all-time high, the reason for this is the need for a modern offering that is increasingly intelligent. The race to the intelligent contact center is on, and going forward, the base capabilities for ICC will be assumed. The challenge will be for automation and intelligence, both for human agents and now, increasingly, for the computer-based virtual agents. This Research Note evaluates the trends in the market and identifies 15 key providers that are making a difference in intelligent contact centers.

One of the things that is driving the demand for the contact center is better customer experiences. The need to understand who the customer prospect is one of the foundational elements that leads to a better experience both during the call and often during the post-call correspondence. Regarding customer experience, omnichannel capabilities are also now given. The need to be able to offer multiple levels of customer interaction will continue to be a differentiator for some providers.

The need for better customer experiences has put pressure on both contact center operators and the providers that supply them. The need to offer omnichannel communication options is important to enable individualized customer service experiences. Since incoming customer service requests will vary widely in context and technology used (laptop, smartphone, etc.), contact centers must have a sufficient communications framework in place to support variations in customer experiences.

The Contact Center in a Post-Covid Economy

We are in the midst of a post-Covid return to work, which also means being able to do more things virtually and provide better levels of customer support. While hybrid work is now a de facto standard for knowledge workers, Aragon feels that some enterprises will continue to let contact center agents work virtually.

However, in many industries, we do feel that there will be a push for agents to return to the contact center due to the efficiency of scale.

The other reality is that customers have become much more demanding and have higher expectations and less tolerance for bad support. Given the demands for high levels of customer support, enterprises are not wasting time and are quick to make a switch to a different provider if levels of service go down.

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At the same time, the shift to intelligent contact centers Note 1: Customer Data Platform (CDP) provides an opportunity for fast-moving providers to be Definition able to offer a differentiated service, such as much Customer data platforms collect information and faster answers to common questions than can be attributes about customer or prospect activity. delivered via virtual agents. The long-term goal of a CDP is to predict behaviors so that the right offer can be made at the right time to close a deal. In some cases, a Today, the race to intelligent contact centers includes CDP may be the core knowledge base of a being able to offer choice to buyers about an on- contact center offering, but in a number of growing cases, more data is needed to build premise or cloud-based solution. This report covers enhanced customer experiences. both sets of providers, most of which are in the process of augmenting their offerings to provide more choice. CDPs leverage machine learning-based analytics systems and other data-driven insights to help provide a clear and instructive picture of customer activity. The goal of a CDP-enhanced contact Customer Data Platforms Are Here—Powering center platform is to understand buyer journeys to Intelligent CRM Platforms enable the right offer to be made at the right time.

The question has always been about the efficiencies of contact centers and the relationship between the contact center and the customer relationship management platform. Last year, we talked about customer data platforms and their importance.

The other big shift that is occurring is that major CRM providers are enhancing their platforms to make them more intelligent. Often the customer data platform capabilities, which include enhanced profiles, are starting to become modules that can be added to the CRM platform.

In many cases, enterprises may want to evaluate upgrading their CRM offering to be AI-based so that they can take advantage of automatic updates to profiles based on pattern recognition of the CRM system itself.

Salesforce is a good example. Its Einstein sales and service cloud provides the ability to allow for new contacts to be automatically added to a case or an opportunity. All the human agent needs to do is click ‘yes,’ and that information can be automatically updated or added to the account or case record.

One of the key evaluation criteria is how well the contact center provider integrates with the de facto CRM

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021 platform in the enterprise. One of the key things that need to be evaluated is what type of information can be added to the account profile.

Customer Experience and the Universal Customer Profile

One of the big things when designing a contact center or upgrading one is ensuring that the customer profile has enough data that a good experience can be provided. Looking for specific information about customer preferences and past experiences can be done through customer profiles. This will enable better interactions, as the system automatically knows that a particular customer only wants to communicate via SMS messages, for example.

Omnichannel Communications—Voice, Email, Chat, and Video

As mentioned above, intelligent contact centers need to have basic capabilities that include traditional voice, email, and chat. A new trend that we've seen emerging is that some providers are now offering video communications as a way to enhance the interaction with the customer. Just as with remote work and the shift from voice conferencing to video conferencing, there is an opportunity for some providers to differentiate themselves by offering video-based support. The key thing is to understand what the customer desires and be able to offer that interaction either on a regular basis or on-demand.

Aragon feels that power dialers, while important for outbound sales, are not the way of the future. Omni-channel outreach based on customer preferences should be evaluated as the go-forward way to communicate with customers.

Prediction: By YE 2023, 50% of ICC providers will know the right type of communication channel to use for outbound campaigns (70% probability).

Many ICC providers have improved their omnichannel capabilities due to customer demand and due to COVID-19. As mentioned above, some of the providers have started to add video capabilities to complement their voice messaging and email channels. Chat continues to grow as an alternative to email, and this is due to the increased use of virtual agents and customer preferences. Part of the reason for this is that the virtual agent can have a conversation with a human to triage a support need and then line up the appropriate resource—whether it be another virtual agent or a human agent.

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Key Trends Driving Digital Transformation

During the pandemic, the need to transform was forced upon many enterprises. Along the way, technology also improved so that more personalized interactions could occur. Two technology trends—the adoption of cloud computing and the maturation of artificial intelligence technologies—are responsible for creating, and to some extent, fulfilling these expectations.

Cloud Continues to Power the ICC Market

The demand for contact centers has never been greater, and part of the reason for this is the ability to quickly deploy an intelligent contact center as a SaaS application. Pure SaaS ICC players have seen tremendous growth, and there are no signs that this is going to slow down.

There has been a significant surge in both the small and midsize contact center markets. We are also seeing smaller providers starting to go into larger contact center deals. This is because of the fact that many of these SaaS providers can do a faster deployment than traditional on-premise. Large providers have responded to this by offering modern cloud options as well as hybrid cloud, which leverages containers.

Hybrid Cloud—Why Containerized Applications and Data Residency Matter

We continue to see maturity in the ability to deploy SaaS applications as managed services on-premise. This is also known as hybrid cloud. The vendor manager of the application upgrades just as it would in its own SaaS data center; however, in this case, that container may be in a shared data center or in the enterprise on a private data center.

The maturity of one of the most popular open-source container technologies, known as Kubernetes, is one of the reasons enterprises are feeling more comfortable with this hybrid cloud approach. Part of the reason for this is not having multi-tenant capabilities and the associated potential co-mingling of data.

Data residency continues to be the number one issue for large enterprises, particularly those that compete against existing cloud providers such as Amazon AWS. Keeping control of enterprise data is a top priority, and containerized applications go a long way towards solving that issue.

Virtual Contact Center Comes of Age

Last year, Aragon estimated that 40% of the workforce would work remotely permanently, and contact centers are also subject to having a certain percentage of their workforce remote. While remote agents clearly create a challenge for managers, we do

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021 expect to see a surge of employees returning to the office and to the contact center in 2022.

For the time being, contact center providers who can demonstrate virtual agent capabilities have been able to win more deals in a shorter amount of time. Aragon feels that virtual agent capabilities will become a de facto standard as part of almost every provider's capabilities. One of the interim ways that managers can deal with this hybrid work scenario is by having alternate days when agents report to the office. This can enable proper social distancing and can also boost morale as people get to see each other and interact.

The Convergence of UCC and ICC—Better Together

There is no denying the fact that unified communications and collaboration capabilities integrate very well with contact centers. One way to look at this is that the contact center is an advanced communications application and that some teams need more than just basic telephony and messaging. For this reason, we see UCC and ICC on a collision course, and more buyers want to buy an integrated offering.

A number of providers in this report offer a combined UCC and contact center offering. This includes 8x8, Atos Unify, Avaya, Cisco, Fuze, Mitel, NEC, Vonage. Note that it is the combination of an integrated client combined with growing capabilities in intelligence, which will bring new levels of automation to a combined offering.

Figure 1: Enterprises are increasingly looking for an integrated communications stack that can blend UC&C with intelligent contact centers.

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Building a Knowledge Base for ICC—Profiles and Graphs

For a modern consumer or enterprise user with an app-centric view of the world, obtaining product information or solving a problem with a product requires contact with the enterprise, and they expect to be:

● Recognized—Authenticated. ● Remembered—An intelligent contact center (ICC) customer profile should include historical data about their account and any previous ICC interactions. ● Understood—The ICC agent(s) should identify the issue, articulate it to the customer, and get confirmation to ensure understanding. ● Satisfied—An ICC should ensure that the issue has been resolved by requesting confirmation after presenting the results, findings, or recommendations to the customer.

The opportunity comes in the form of options to differentiate by providing more personalized services and more automated yet engaging customer journeys. These app- savvy customers are digital-ready: they have used consumer and enterprise apps in the cloud and expect to consume functionality in manageable units and to mix and match functions from different vendors when necessary. They want integration without becoming integrators. This is why the need for an enhanced profile powered by customer data is vital.

Prediction: By YE 2023, 50% of contact center providers will enable the development of an enhanced customer profile that will enable a more personalized customer experience (70% probability).

Knowledge Graphs, Sentiment, and Customer Data Platforms Will Power Advanced Analytics for Humans and Virtual Agents

While AI-based systems automatically correlate relationships, knowledge graphs (KGs) are a visual way to see what is going on with information that is tied to a set of topics and or individuals. While knowledge is a staple in the contact center, knowledge graphs are only starting to emerge now.

Knowledge graphs will depend on increasing amounts of data, and modern contact centers will need to tap into customer data platforms (CDPs) (see Figure 2). In some cases, a KG will help to power advanced analytics that, in turn, will allow the enterprise to understand relationships between customer satisfaction and product quality.

For the contact center, voice analytics means optimization. Sentiment analysis—the ability to detect emotion from voice input—is key for customer service requests where a rep must effectively address a customer’s needs and, ideally, maintain that customer’s

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021 loyalty. Sentiment analysis can offer call reps insights into the consumer’s experience, which can then be used to tailor the remaining interaction to enhance or correct anything undesired. Higher quality analytics can ensure that proper adjustments are made in real- time. The “real-time” element of analytics is invaluable because interactions must be optimized in a (usually) very short window of time. This length of time can either make or break a customer for life.

Figure 2: Intelligent contact centers will increasingly need to integrate with customer data platforms.

The Current State of Artificial Intelligence

The growth of the conversational AI market overall is spilling over into the ICC market. More providers added more virtual agent capabilities in the last year than in the previous five years combined. There are still significant opportunities to leverage deep learning to enable more advanced customer experiences, and Aragon expects this to happen over time. The ability to build the enhanced customer profile will enable more advanced predictions to occur, such as

● predictive buying ● predictive turnover ● highly accurate next best actions for human agents and virtual agents

There is a race to build intelligent contact centers. Much of the focus today is on automation—both scripted workflows and now automated ones. The other focus is on overall intelligence, which is where AI comes into play. Most ICC providers are partnering for AI, which is what normally happens when new technologies emerge.

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Bot Building Goes Low Code

Early chatbot building required programming skills. This required the business user to engage their IT organization to build and deploy their chatbots. This also created friction with the ability to iterate and modify the functions of the chatbot as it required a re- engagement with IT whenever a change was needed. Many modern chatbots include the ability to build and deploy through a low-code graphical bot builder. This has enabled business users to build, update, and test their chatbots on their own, providing them the flexibility to change their chatbots virtually on demand. There are even vendor offerings in this space where the virtual agent is capable right out of the box to assist the business owner in building a new virtual agent through natural language requests. In other words, bots are building bots. One of the low-code features that enterprises should pay attention to is the ability to easily edit conversation flows—to make adjustments via a visual workflow user interface that allows the user or manager to make slight tweaks or to change the order of a conversation. An example might be changing the greeting or the set of questions the chatbot is asking the human.

Deploying Virtual Agents Now

For enterprises, the good news is that many of the providers in this report have more virtual agent capabilities that can be deployed much quicker than in the past. However, adoption continues to be spotty, and many enterprises are still in the pilot stage of putting virtual agents to work. For those that have gone into production, they have seen substantial benefits.

As we highlighted last year, virtual agents do better when they have a very focused use case, which isn't that different from human agents. Task-specific virtual agents can be trained faster and can be deployed in production in hours, days, or weeks because they only do very specific tasks.

Examples of task-specific virtual agents include greeting bots, or scheduling and routing, which replaces a traditional IVR. Specific Q&A virtual agents are also one of the most popular ways to get started. This is due to the fact that they can be trained and deployed quickly and can produce increases in customer satisfaction by troubleshooting and answering questions faster.

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Preparing for the Rise of Digital Labor

The digital labor market, which represents the growth of chatbots and virtual agents, is one of the fastest-growing software markets that Aragon has identified. There is no doubt that human agents and digital agents will coexist. It was last year that Aragon introduced the concept of digital labor, which represents the body of computer-based chatbot agents that we see growing at a 10x rate between now and 2025.

There is no doubt that digital agents are cheaper and more efficient, but they are usually best at single tasks, such as answering questions. Therefore, enterprises actually need to have a plan for digital labor and the different types of agents they will deploy in a contact center (see Note 2 and Note 3 below).

Figure 3: Use cases for bots/virtual agents continue to expand.

Figure 3 shows that the use cases for conversational AI continue to expand. The contact center is one of the most competitive areas for the overall digital labor market.

Prediction: By YE 2021, virtual agents (e.g., digital labor) will become a key feature of intelligent contact center offerings. This will force enterprises to do planning for the ratio of human labor to digital labor.

Contact Center Feature Wars Give Way to More Use Cases

More ICC providers added more features to their portfolio than in previous years. This is due to two things: market demand and competition among vendors.

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While SaaS cloud offerings are now a given, the Note 2: Digital Labor Defined ability to offer multi-cloud deployments (using different public cloud providers in different Digital labor is a term that applies to the automation of tasks that are performed by geographic regions) is still a work in progress for computer applications. These tasks were formerly many providers. This type of offering is only being performed by humans. done by larger providers. Digital labor can be used for data entry, for warehouse operations by a robot, or in call When it comes to features, the focus on features centers to solve the problems that humans are having with a particular product or service. often outweighs the focus on the ability to streamline an inbound journey. Omnichannel channels are now One thing is clear: digital labor is here to stay. a given, as is CRM integration.

Workforce Optimization—Integrated Vs. Best of Breed Note 3: The Benefits of Digital Labor

Additionally, the market has begun to transition from Contact center providers will need to focus on the best-of-breed workforce optimization capabilities to new way of working and justify further native capabilities. One of the challenges of investments by meeting specific requirements: workforce optimization (WO) is the need to balance • Faster first call resolution—Improves human and digital labor. Increasingly, we expect to customer satisfaction, saves the cost of see WO offerings by 2025 with a combination of bot rework. and human scheduling. • Lower customer effort/time—Improves customer satisfaction, reduces contact center resource requirements. The Intelligent Contact Center Is Here • Reduced customer churn—A result of meeting the first two requirements. There's been significant progress in the last year, • Lower costs for every function—Call handling, escalations, etc. and today, we can say that the intelligent contact • Improved agent experience—A result of center is here. However, many enterprises have yet reduced stress and frustration through to see the benefits because many providers still do prescriptive insight. not offer digital labor capabilities to allow virtual agents to be added to their legacy offering.

The good news is that it is not hard to add a virtual agent to a legacy platform. While many providers continue to partner, more providers have invested in acquiring conversational AI platforms that enable the building of virtual agents. Aragon feels that for many enterprises, we are still in the early stages of adoption.

There is now a race to show improvements in employee and customer experience. Virtual agents are one of the ways to speed up the overall

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021 experience—not for everything but for many mundane things such as basic questions and answers.

Frequent updates are a benefit of a cloud-based ICC offering. Not all providers update their platforms regularly, and this should be part of the due diligence for an enterprise when searching for a new provider. Providers who partner for virtual agents should be evaluated for the level of integration being provided and asked for specific roadmaps for future virtual agents.

Prediction: By YE 2022, AI-based contact centers will be able to identify the real issue a customer is facing 50% faster than traditional approaches.

Voice Analytics Go Realtime

The big shift in analytics is that real-time understanding is needed. Gone are the days of offline transcription. Voice conversations need to be monitored in real-time and processed so that the customer can be assisted faster. It is important to understand if your provider actually has NLP and NLU deployed as part of their voice analytics.

Figure 4: The intelligent contact center will be increasingly composed of human and virtual agents.

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Conversational AI—Providers Go Their Own Note 4: Google Contact Center AI Partners Way Google has a growing set of partners that are planning to leverage the forthcoming Google While many providers have partnered with Contact Center AI offering. These include: Google's contact center AI over the last two years, we've seen a shift away from this partnership. • Avaya • Cisco Today more providers have introduced their own • Five9 capabilities or acquired firms to be able to offer • Genesys • Mitel their own native virtual agent capabilities. Five9 • Nice InContact and Genesys each acquired firms and now offer • odigo their own native virtual agent capabilities. • Telia • Twilio • UJet Many firms continue to partner with Google, just as many are also working with Amazon Lex and Note 5: Alternatives to Google Contact Center

IBM Watson Assistant. There are a growing • Airin.ai number of emerging providers who can augment • Amelia contact center deployments and go beyond basic • Avaamo • Expressive chat to question-and-answer bots and more (see • IBM Note 5). • Invoca • LivePerson • Revation The Current State of Google Contact Center AI • Observe.ai • Pypestream • Quiq Regarding Google Contact Center AI, in 2021, it • Rayon.ai • Rul.ai made Agent Assist for Chat available as a public • Voca preview. It allows human agents to get assistance • Zammo.ai with Smart Replies—i.e., it provides the suggested • Zoovu reply for the agent to respond with.

It also provides a knowledge base with articles and other content to provide the agent with information to assist the customer with. Aragon’s take is that many early partners of Google have moved on to developing their own partner networks, given the huge number of conversational AI providers.

Virtual Agent Capabilities are a Must-Have for Modern Contact Centers

There is no denying that virtual agents are making a difference in the market. Providers that have offered their own capabilities or partnered have

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021 seen higher growth rates than traditional contact center providers.

Just like with humans, virtual agents do require continuous training so that they can answer questions and help customers in the most efficient manner. Allowing humans to help train conversational AI models is one of the new trends, and providers such as Talkdesk have innovated in this area.

The Increased Need for Profiles and Knowledge Repositories

The intelligent contact center will be more optimized with better customer profile information that Aragon refers to as an enhanced profile. ICC providers continue to partner with customer relationship management offerings to ensure customer profiles are maintained and up-to-date. However, additional information in the form of customer data platforms represents a trend that most CRM providers are embracing so that the best customer experience can be offered.

This, along with better information in the form of advanced knowledge repositories, will allow both humans and virtual agents to help customers more efficiently.

Humans and virtual agents should be able to identify customers as individuals, remember relevant information about previous interactions with them (contextual, historical data), and choose an appropriate next action when supplied with sufficient data. Artificial intelligence can help facilitate these capabilities. There are three key reasons for AI now (see Note 6 below).

Building a Roadmap for Virtual Agents

It is now clear that virtual agents can do many of the things that humans do. Depending on the conversational AI platform chosen, the ability to deploy different types of virtual agents may vary.

The types of virtual agents include:

Greeting Agents

These agents gather client information and identify the issue at hand. Using a combination of natural language understanding and emotion/sentiment/tone analysis, an ICC can more accurately represent or classify the current request in context.

Human Agent Assist (Next Best Action)

Beyond guiding the agents as they answer inquiries from clients, there are opportunities to leverage predictive analytics and ML to offer additional options, products, and

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services (upselling) appropriate to the current Note 6: Why AI Now? context or to trigger events in the system that will follow up at a later date. 1. Customer Expectations Are Evolving Faster Than Enterprises Can Respond:

Once the appropriate agent, human or bot, has been The need to resolve problems faster and matched with the customer, the ICC can continue to streamline customer journeys is one of the reasons enterprises are looking for ways to provide value by guiding the agent towards a automate contact center processes to solve successful outcome based on experience with customer issues with faster rates of productivity similar inquiries. It all comes down to expertise and and resolution. empathy—the ability to provide an appropriate 2. Consumers Expect Personalized and response with the right tone for the situation. Consistent Experiences:

Consumers have very high expectations today. Customer Assist (Questions and Answers or They expect fast customer service, regardless of Refunds) their age. This growing set of expectations is what will fuel the race to the intelligent contact center. It will drive acquisition of AI firms by contact Most customer inquiries are for questions and center providers and overall consolidation in the market. answers. Virtual agents are ideal at handling this, and they can do it very quickly. Having topic or product 3. NLP Means Understanding Sentiment and specialist virtual agents is something to consider for Predicting the Reason for Customer Engagement: the broader rollout of digital labor in an intelligent contact center. Due to technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), software applications can now participate in mobile messaging conversations in Intelligent Routing and Scheduling the form of a chatbot.

For practical purposes, chatbots define the Intelligent routing can be automated via virtual customer or user experience (CX/UX). This agents, which helps to speed up resolution. Several partitioning of functionality makes it possible to retrofit an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to an ICC providers now offer virtual agent routing and existing application, which can improve its scheduling. performance and extend its life without requiring a complete re-write.

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The Aragon Research Globe™ for Intelligent Contact Centers, 2021 (As of 7/15/2021)

Figure 5: The Aragon Research Globe for Intelligent Contact Centers, 2021.

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Leaders

8x8 8x8, which announced industry veteran David Sipes as CEO in December 2020, offers the X Series platform that includes the 8x8 Work application as well as an integrated contact center. In addition to Dave Sipes, 8x8 has added a number of new executives to the firm, including Walt Weisner as Chief Customer Officer and Amritesh Chaudhuri as Chief Marketing Officer. In May 2021, 8x8 announced its leadership position in the integrated UC&C and contact center category that it calls XCaaS, or Experience Communications as a Service. The 8x8 Experience Communications platform includes Contact Center, Voice, Video, Chat, and CPaaS APIs.

In March 2021, 8x8 announced its Microsoft-certified 8x8 Contact Center for Microsoft Teams. The integration takes advantage of the 8x8 Contact Center Omnichannel capabilities. 8x8 also offers 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams, and with it, the ability to offer voice calling for Microsoft Teams users in 43 countries. Part of the renewed product focus at 8x8 also means that it announced a financially backed SLA that offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee across its platform, to include both UC&C and contact center.

8x8’s Dynamic Integration Framework allows 8x8 users to achieve more seamless connectivity with over 50 partner apps, including Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and Slack. 8x8 has a growing global cloud footprint that includes 35 cloud regions located in North America, the UK, EU, APAC, and Brazil, to name a few. With its new integrated UC&C and contact center offering, 8x8 is poised to meet the demand for a fully integrated offering to address the needs of both formal and informal contact center use cases.

Strengths Challenges ● UCaaS offering ● Overall focus on AI ● Contact center features ● Brand awareness ● Partner integrations ● CRM integration

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Avaya Avaya, led by CEO Jim Chirico, has continued to execute in both its Contact Center Unified Communications and Collaboration offerings. Avaya has one of the largest contact center install bases, offering private, public, and hybrid cloud.

Avaya’s portfolio includes Avaya OneCloud CCaaS, an AI-powered, multi-cloud experience platform that enables organizations to create and deliver in-the-moment experiences. It is designed to provide the foundational, rich capabilities required to meet sophisticated customer needs while offering organizations the speed and agility to innovate and change on demand.

Avaya OneCloud CCaaS connects all touchpoints across the customer journey--including voice, video, chat, messaging, and social. OneCloud CCaaS Is powered by AI at the core, enabling organizations to integrate their AI strategy any way they need, to build their own, bring their own, or leverage Avaya’s or Avaya’s partners. This is based on Avaya’s new AI Workflow capability, announced in April 2021, that enables the building of new virtual agents that can integrate Google IBM Watson, Nuance, and other conversational AI offerings into custom or pre-built solution virtual agents. The AI workflow offering features a low code/no code interface making it easier for non-programmers to build virtual agents. Avaya Supports a multi-cloud application ecosystem, combining the Avaya portfolio together with a variety of cloud platforms, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and IBM, along with market leaders such as Verint, Google, Afiniti, and Nuance. Avaya OneCloud CCaaS integrates with Avaya Spaces, which provides a complete unified communications and collaboration solution with collaboration, meetings, messaging, and calling backed by both its enterprise and midmarket platforms.

Strengths Challenges ● Avaya OneCloud portfolio that includes not just ● Balancing its on-premise and cloud offerings CCaaS but UCaaS and CPaaS ● Large deployment and cloud migration expertise ● Installed base Native AI expertise and AI partner network ● Extensive partner network and ecosystem ● Path to cloud for every customer to minimize cost and risk ● Composable enterprise architecture with CPaaS as a ‘force multiplier’ for CCaaS to provide agility, speed & value

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Webex by Cisco Cisco, a leader in UCC, has continued its multi-year strategy to enhance its contact center portfolio and make it intelligent. Cisco Contact Center General Manager Omar Tawakol helped to lead the charge to reinvigorate the Cisco Contact Center offerings by leveraging acquisitions and organic engineering development. In December 2020, Cisco announced a new cloud-based native contact center offering. The new cloud offering leverages modern capabilities, including Kubernetes containerization and microservices. It also takes advantage of omnichannel capabilities from its 2021 acquisition of IMImobile, which provides additional features, including an expanding array of digital channels and a robust drag-and-drop flow builder. Webex Contact Center also integrates with Salesforce Service Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics, and Zendesk.

The new portfolio includes Webex Contact Center, Webex Experience Management, and Webex Workforce Optimization. Webex Experience Management is based on the Cisco acquisition of CloudCherry in 2019. This solution captures real-time customer sentiment and presents key insights to Cisco’s integrated agent desktop.

Cisco has a large install base of on-premise customers ranging from SMB to enterprise and provides much of its innovative AI, experience management, and digital channel technologies as cloud-based services available to both its on-premises and cloud-native Webex Contact Center products, delivering a common solution set across both deployment options. Cisco also offers integrated communications, including Webex Calling as an option.

Thanks to its acquisition of Voicea, Cisco now has significant capabilities for voice analytics, including real-time transcription, wrap-up notes, and action items. Cisco continues to partner with Google for speech-based AI, and in 2021, it announced the availability of its own organic Agent Answers solution based on proprietary AI technology.

With the combination of Voicea Voice Transcription and Analytics, Google Contact Center AI, and internally-developed AI solutions, Cisco is well-positioned for the shift to the intelligent contact center.

Strengths Challenges ● Cisco brand ● Balancing multiple CC offerings ● Contact center install base ● Focus on AI ● Flexible cloud, premises, and hybrid deployment options ● End-to-end encryption ● Overall UCC capabilities

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Five9 Five9, based in San Ramon and led by CEO Rowan Trollope, saw exceptional double-digit growth over the last twelve months as it continued to expand its global footprint. It also continued its global expansion in 2020 and pushed further into conversational AI. In October 2020, Five9 announced that it was acquiring conversational AI provider Inference Solutions. Inference provides AI-based intelligent virtual agents, and with these native capabilities, Five9 can offer conversational AI-based offerings to enterprises that have a separate contact center platform, whether that is on-premise or in the cloud.

Based on its acquisition of Virtual Observer, Five9 offers its own workforce engagement management (WEM) offering. While it still partners with other WEM providers, enterprises can now get a complete ICC solution from Five9. Five9 also offers integrations with CRM providers Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Zendesk, and ServiceNow.

Five9 has continued to make AI and automation part of the core product strategy, and with Inference it can also offer virtual agent capabilities to enterprises that have third-party contact center providers. Five9 supports both inbound and outbound use cases and has global call support and routing alongside omni-channel support. Five9 continues to offer integrations into the Intelligent Cloud Contact Center platform, with over 300 API and SDK in particular for the UC space with providers such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Mitel, and Nextiva. Five9 offers its own white glove implementation service that continues to help it win new customers and retain existing ones. Five9’s focus on innovation and market expansion are two of the reasons for its continued growth.

Strengths Challenges ● Cloud offering ● Awareness outside of North America ● Inbound and outbound focus ● Omnichannel features ● Salesforce integration ● Customer support ● Growing focus on AI

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Genesys

Genesys, led by CEO Tony Bates, has continued to focus on the shift to the Experience as a Service. Genesys has two main offerings for the contact center, including Genesys Cloud CX, which is a public cloud offering leveraging microservices, and Genesys Multicloud CX, which is a multi-cloud offering (public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, or hybrid) leveraging containerization. For communications, Genesys has native capabilities as well as partnerships with Microsoft and Zoom to offer choice in the area of unified communications and collaboration.

In December 2020, Genesys announced a business unit called Genesys Digital and AI and named Industry Veteran Barry O’Sullivan to run it. In March 2021, Genesys announced the intent to acquire Bold360, a leader in AI-powered digital customer engagement and conversational AI, from LogMeIn for an undisclosed sum. This will help Genesys meet the demand for virtual agents, which is part of the growing digital labor market. The acquisition closed in May 2021.

Genesys Multicloud CX is the new cloud-native contact center software offering available today as a CCaaS offering managed by Genesys, on AWS and Azure; and which will be made available to System Integrators (SI), partners and customers by the end of 2021. It is planned to support OpenShift, Azure, AWS, and GCP or any other Kubernetes-based deployments. Globally, Genesys Multicloud CX CCaaS is deployed in 16 AWS data centers and Azure regions in 4 continents.

Genesys Cloud CX is available via ten AWS data center locations. In 2020, three locations were added for Canada, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. In April 2021, the latest location in India became available. Genesys Cloud CX has named concurrent or hourly/usage-based pricing options.

Strengths Challenges ● Broad ICC platform capabilities ● Maintaining and enhancing multiple product ● Management team experience offerings ● Install base ● Conversational AI ● Large enterprise deployments ● Strong partnerships ● Usage-based pricing ● FedRAMP Authorized ● Integrated workforce optimization

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

NICE CXone NICE continues to offer CXone, its flagship ICC offering. CXone is offered both direct and via NICE’s growing partner network that includes UC&C providers such as Atos and RingCentral. NICE also offers its own native workflow management, workforce optimization, and analytics solutions. In April 2021, NICE announced a new offering called CXone Expert, which is based on its acquisition of MindTouch. MindTouch is a San Diego-based vendor, which provides a knowledge management platform that works with a number of contact center and CRM platforms.

NICE continues to offer its Enlighten AI-powered sentiment analysis and agent behavioral scoring, which enables predictive behavioral routing, real-time interaction guidance on next-best agent behavior, and automatic quality scoring that includes soft skills.

In January 2021, NICE announced that it was providing tighter integration between CXone and Microsoft Teams. Now the CXone Agent can be embedded in Microsoft Teams. NICE also offers a native Lightning user interface, which enables tight integration between Salesforce digital channels and CXone Voice.

CXone provides solid CRM integration with providers such as Salesforce and Microsoft. NICE continued its partnerships with RingCentral and Zoom and added Atos/Unify as a new European partner. As a response to COVID-19, NICE announced CXone@home, which enables more human agents to work remotely. Now it offers Fast Start and a permanent offer to companies with a 60-day no-obligation trial.

Strengths Challenges ● Cloud offering ● Balancing between direct and third-party ● Integrations partners for implementation ● AI focus ● Partner network ● Endpoints ● Global partner ecosystem

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Talkdesk Talkdesk, based in San Francisco and led by CEO Tiago Paiva, has continued its growth over the last year with expansion into additional markets internationally. Talkdesk also bolstered its leadership team with a number of new executives that are focused on support and international markets. Talkdesk offers a full ICC Platform with WEM and its own virtual agent capabilities, powered by its Talkdesk AI platform. In April 2021, Talkdesk announced Talkdesk Workspace, a visual framework that allows the Talkdesk user interface to be personalized and unifies all CX applications and data on a single pane of glass for every role in the customer journey, and Talkdesk Builder, a new set of low-, no- and custom-code tools that allow the contact center to be customized across Workspaces, routing, reporting, and integrations.

Talkdesk AI platform was enhanced in March 2021 with the addition of the Talkdesk AI Trainer. AI Trainer allows agents with domain knowledge to improve their AI models by providing input that helps to train the AI models automatically. We suspect other providers will adopt this “human-in-the-loop” approach to optimizing AI models.

Talkdesk also offers Talkdesk Guide, its intelligent knowledge base powered by the Talkdesk AI platform. In March 2021, Talkdesk announced deeper integration with Zoom Phone that includes calling between Talkdesk agents and Zoom phone users as well as directory and presence integration to enable greater collaboration between agents and subject matter experts across the entire organization.

Talkdesk also announced two ICC-based industry-specific products, including Talkdesk Financial Services Experience Cloud™ and Talkdesk Healthcare Experience Cloud™, and several industry solutions, including the Talkdesk Small Business Lending Solution, Talkdesk Vaccine Administration Solution, Talkdesk Vacation Now solution, Talkdesk Flexible Shopping Solution, and Talkdesk Retail Smart Service Solution. With its focus on virtual agents, along with its new solutions, Talkdesk is making its mark in ICC. Talkdesk makes deployments easier through built-in integrations with 60+ CRM and other business systems that are powered by its APIs. Talkdesk also offers a robust app marketplace, AppConnect, that extends Talkdesk CX Cloud capabilities with 1-click access to over 80 contact center offerings. Talkdesk continues to push the envelope in the intelligent contact center.

Strengths Challenges ● Cloud contact center ● Brand awareness outside of the U.S. ● APIs ● Focus on AI ● Industry products & solutions ● Workforce management ● Partner ecosystem ● Analytics

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Contenders Alvaria

Alvaria is the new name of the firm formed by the merger of Aspect and Noble Systems, based in Atlanta and led by CEO Patrick Dennis. The private firm will be majority-owned by Arby Partners, with Vector Capital continuing as a minority partner. Alvaria includes the Aspect Via® Platform cloud contact center offering that supports omnichannel capabilities with support for chat, including social media chat, such as Facebook.

In August 2020, Aspect announced the Aspect Via 20 Cloud Contact Center release that offers intelligent inbound routing and outbound campaign capabilities. The updated offering supports a work from anywhere model. Besides workforce management, the Aspect Via Platform includes performance management, quality management, and voice and text analytics.

Noble also has a full ICC platform that includes expertise in outbound communications, WEM, Nobile IQ, and Noble Game for gamification for recognition and goal attainment. The combined entity has a large install base as well as strong expertise in vertical markets, including education, government, financial services, healthcare, hospitality, utilities, and transportation.

Strengths Challenges ● Full CC platform ● Focus on AI ● Large install base ● Cloud partnerships with Amazon and Microsoft ● Full workforce optimization offering ● Partner network

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Fuze Fuze, based in Boston and led by CEO Brian Day, has continued to execute with its integrated contact center and UC&C offering. In February 2021, Day announced that Fuze’s revenues were now over $100 Million annually and also that industry veteran Chris Jones was joining as Chief Revenue Officer. The Fuze contact center is integrated with the Fuze native client; it also leverages the robust Fuze UCC platform. In March 2021, Fuze announced a new agent-centric supervisor view for its contact center offering. It provides detailed insights into specific agent actions and behaviors and is also fully mobile-enabled so supervisors can leverage a tablet if they are on the go. It also announced partnerships with Verint Monet & Envision to add workforce engagement capabilities.

In June 2021, Fuze announced that its contact center will be sold standalone, independent of its UC&C platform, with licensing that bundles Quick Start implementation services for faster enablement. For enterprises that need scale, Fuze partners and has integrations with both Five9 and NICE. However, for small enterprises, Fuze has been quietly selling its own native contact center for years. Fuze can integrate with a number of leading enterprise applications, such as Salesforce Service Now, NetSuite, Zendesk, Bullhorn, and others.

The Fuze platform has continued to push the envelope on ease of use, leveraging its wholly- owned IP for audio, video, and chat, and this is why it has continued to win large enterprise deals. As enterprises realize the need for an integrated ICC and UCC offering, Fuze offers those buyers a significant set of capabilities.

Strengths Challenges ● UCC platform ● Balancing multiple products for contact center ● Contact center focus ● Voice and video quality ● Large global enterprise deployments ● Mobility experience ● Unified client

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Mitel Mitel, led by CEO Mary McDowell, offers a combination of UC&C as well as a number of contact center offerings. In the last nine months, Mitel added new executives, including CFO James Yersh and CMO David Silke. The Mitel portfolio includes its cloud-based MiCloud Connect Contact Center and its private cloud-based MiContact Center Business. In May 2021, Mitel announced a partnership with Five9, in which it will resell the complete Five9 Contact Center offerings.

Mitel offers a complete UCC portfolio for both its cloud and on-premise UC offerings, including omnichannel contact center and endpoints. Mitel continues to partner with Google for virtual agent and agent assist capabilities, and now it will be able to leverage Five9’s capabilities as well.

With UC&C and a growing ICC portfolio, Mitel also focuses on a number of vertical markets, including education, government, hospitality, healthcare, insurance and banking, sports, and entertainment. These solutions, along with the Mitel Marketplace, allow enterprises to integrate Mitel with a growing number of applications. Its cloud-based APIs and flexible deployment options for UCC and ICC (on- premise, hybrid cloud) provide enterprises flexibility if they require things such as data residency.

Strengths Challenges ● Cloud and on-premise support ● Balancing multiple distinct contact center ● Global cloud infrastructure offerings ● Hybrid cloud API marketplace accessible to on- site customers ● End-to-end offerings ● Mid-market expertise ● Global partner ecosystem

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

NEC NEC, a large multi-national provider of IT infrastructure and communications offerings, made some significant moves to shift to the cloud. In April 2020, NEC announced a joint partnership with Intermedia and established NEC UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT and NEC BLUE ENGAGE, both powered by Intermedia. UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT offers a full set of capabilities, including cloud communications (UCaaS), messaging, and meetings. UNIVERGE BLUE ENGAGE offers a complete cloud-based contact center.

Besides UNIVERGE BLUE ENGAGE, powered by Intermedia, its portfolio of contact center offerings includes Business Connect and the UNIVERGE SV8100 and SV9000 series. NEC segments its offerings for small (five agents) and medium/large (up to 2000 agents). NEC also offers a full set of capabilities, including cloud communications (UCaaS), messaging, meetings, and contact center. NEC partners with DVSAnalytics for workforce optimization (WFO). Its WFO includes forecasting, scheduling, recording, speech analytics, and live monitoring.

In addition, NEC is now focused on a number of vertical industries, including education, government, healthcare, retail, and SMB. With an increased focus on cloud, NEC can offer more choice to its large install base of on-premise clients.

Strengths Challenges ● Cloud and on-premise voice support ● Balancing multiple contact center offerings ● Global cloud infrastructure ● Partnerships ● Analytics ● Global presence

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Atos Unify Atos Unify, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Atos, offers both on-premise and cloud-based contact centers as well as virtual agents. Atos partners with NICE and offers the NICE CXone as its lead cloud contact center offering. Atos Unify continues to offer its OpenScape Contact Center Platform for on-premise and hosted cloud use cases. For virtual agents, Atos Unify works with Google’s contact center AI solution, as well as other 3rd-party AI providers. In November 2020, Atos announced a partnership with Colt Technology Services, which will have Colt offering the Atos cloud-based contact center offering in conjunction with its Colt IQ worldwide network of telephony and omnichannel communications offerings.

OpenScape CC capabilities work in conjunction with its portfolio of UCC solutions, led by the OpenScape Enterprise, OpenScape 4000, the Atos CPaaS orchestration platform, as well as Unify Office, which is powered by RingCentral.

Atos Unify offers two editions of the Atos Unify OpenScape Contact Center: Atos Unify OpenScape Contact Center Agile focused on agent populations of under 100 agents, and Atos Unify OpenScape Contact Center Enterprise for single or multiple sites with up to 1500 concurrent agents per system, 7500 agents per cluster. Atos Unify offers WFM via partners including Verint and ASC, as well as OpenScape Contact Center Analytics from Softcom.

One of the big focus areas for 2021 is vertical market solutions in areas such as government and healthcare, where Atos Unify has historically done well. The alignment with Atos go-to-market will complement existing Unify OpenScape offerings and the Atos CPaaS orchestration platform. It will be a part of the growing Atos digital workplace portfolio.

Strengths Challenges ● Contact center capabilities ● Balancing multiple product offerings for contact ● On-premise and cloud support center ● Vertical industry solutions ● CPaaS platform ● Cloud deployment options

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Vonage Vonage revamped its management team with new executives, including CEO Rory Read, CFO Steve Lasher, COO Jay Bellissimo, CMO Joy Corso, and EVP of Product and Engineering Savinay Berry. Vonage’s portfolio of solutions is built on the Vonage Communications Platform and UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS technology. The Vonage Contact Center solution is a cloud- native, multitenant, global CCaaS solution. VCC is an intelligent communications platform that integrates messaging, communication, and customer/back-office data via built-in connectors, modern web services, and a web API gateway with a customer engagement engine. Core contact center functionality such as omnichannel contact routing, self-service IVR, automated outbound dialing, screen pops, and associated real-time CRM updates are provided globally across clustered data centers in each region.

With integration into ServiceNow’s enterprise-level customer service management solution, VCC provides agents with contextual and relevant data and workflows for better collaboration and an unparalleled customer experience. VCC has a longtime, deep integration into Salesforce’s service and sales clouds and seamlessly integrates with Salesforce.com using Salesforce’s Open CTI standard. Vonage is a select member of the new Service Cloud Voice Partner Telephony Program.

Vonage Contact Center includes integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365, enabling businesses working within the Microsoft ecosystem. In April 2021, Vonage announced new visual engagement, omnichannel, and AI features for its platform. This includes video chat and screen sharing, web chat, as well as virtual assistant capabilities. The visual engagement features work inside of Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and ServiceNow. Agents can escalate any call into a video session on the fly.

Vonage has integrated Vonage Contact Center and its Vonage Business Communications into a single, intuitive interface that connects agents with back-office workers with common call controls, single sign-on, and more. Vonage continues to offer its contact center AI virtual assistant, based on its 2019 acquisition of Over.AI, that is seamlessly integrated with Vonage Contact Center. The Vonage Contact Center solution can also identify a "stuck" chatbot and route it to the best available agent in the voice or chat channel. With a full portfolio and an increasing focus on virtual agents, Vonage is positioned well to take advantage of the growing demand for contact center.

Strengths Challenges ● Contact center offering ● Balancing focus on UC&C and contact center ● Fully integrated UCaaS and CCaaS ● Deep integration and focus on Salesforce ● Vonage brand recognition ● Integration extended to ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics ● CPaaS API flexibility

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Innovators

Altitude Software

Altitude Software was acquired by Enghouse in December 2020 for an undisclosed price. Under Enghouse, Altitude should have more access to capital to help it innovate. Enghouse also offers its own contact center offerings via its Enghouse Interactive subsidiary. Altitude continues to offer a full cloud-based contact center that has a modular solution that supports remote agents, which is important in a post-pandemic era. Altitude Xperience also enables agents to conduct video calls.

While Altitude supports self-service through bots for any channel, such as WhatsApp, Twitter, or Facebook Messenger, it still partners for conversational AI. It gathers all channels and joins bots with human agents to enable a truly omnichannel customer journey.

Altitude Partner integrations include productivity, AI & analytics, CRM (Salesforce and Dynamics), and security. Altitude has done well acquiring customers in Europe, and part of this is due to its industry focus, which includes finance, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, BPO, and retail. Besides customer service and helpdesk, Altitude Software has solutions for debt collectors, customer support and sales, and telemarketing.

Strengths Challenges ● Cloud-based contact center ● Balancing multiple contact center offerings ● Video support ● Industry focus ● Modularity ● Platform and APIs

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Intermedia Intermedia, led by CEO Michael Gold, announced its initial public offering (IPO) in March 2021. Intermedia offers Intermedia Unite, its full UC&C platform, and its Intermedia Contact Center. Intermedia Unite offers cloud-based telephony, messaging, file sync/share, and meetings. Intermedia announced a strategic partnership with NEC in 2020, in which NEC will resell the full Intermedia communications portfolio, including Intermedia Contact Center.

In June 2021, Intermedia announced the Intermedia Extend API Development Portal, which offers a comprehensive set of APIs for all of its product offerings, including contact center.

NEC will resell Intermedia Unite as the NCE UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT and ENGAGE (Contact Center). The NEC partnership provided Intermedia a major OEM partner and a large, global upgrade install base of NEC on-premise contact centers. In June 2021, Intermedia partner NEC announced the availability of its offerings in the UK, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Besides its relationship with NEC, Intermedia sells Unite, AnyMeeting, and its contact center via resellers, some of whom white label the offering with their brand. With its UCC, contact center, and other collaboration offerings, Intermedia is well-positioned for the SMB market.

Strengths Challenges ● Cloud PBX ● Overall focus on AI ● Call center ● Mobile app ● Partnerships ● White label offering for partners

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Getting Started With ICC

The ICC is real, and enterprises will need to make decisions about staying with or migrating away from their existing CC provider. The reason is simple—it is about innovation and providing better customer experiences.

The era of digital labor is here, and virtual agents are making an impact. Making the right AI and chatbot decisions is critical to success with digital labor. Last year saw many enterprises experimenting with virtual agents, and now they are ready to do more. The winning formula is to deploy task-specific bots and to ensure they are updated with knowledge and model adjustments on a regular basis.

Enterprises should continue to ask for detailed product roadmaps for the next 12-24 months.

Aragon Advisory

● Enterprises should look at their contact center in terms of how to serve employees and customers in a more seamless manner. This means evaluating current capabilities and looking at how to automate with virtual agents.

● Enterprises that have not piloted virtual agents in the past year need to start now. If the current provider does not support the integration of virtual agents, evaluate replacing that provider.

● Digital labor is here. Having a virtual agent strategy that goes beyond the initial deployment is critical to continuing to enhance customer experiences.

Bottom Line

We are in the midst of a profound shift in the intelligent contact center market, where conversational AI is becoming a must-have capability. With hybrid cloud, enterprises have more choice when it comes to deployments. The big push is in automation and the addition of virtual agents to the labor pool for instrumenting contact centers. Many enterprises still do not have a digital labor strategy, while those that have a strategy that they successfully execute can often deliver a more robust customer experience. With communications and contact center becoming more integrated, the opportunity for a more integrated stack also can help to reduce the number of providers in the enterprise.

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Aragon Research Globe Overview

The Aragon Research Globe graphically represents our analysis of a specific market and its component vendors. We do a rigorous analysis of each vendor, using three dimensions that enable comparative evaluation of the participants in a given market.

The Aragon Research Globe looks beyond size and market share, which often dominate this type of analysis, and instead uses those as comparative factors in evaluating providers’ product-oriented capabilities. Positioning in the Globe will reflect how complete a provider’s future strategy is, relative to their performance in fulfilling that strategy in the market.

A further differentiating factor is the global market reach of each vendor. This allows all vendors with similar strategy and performance to be compared regardless of their size and market share. It will improve recognition of providers with a comprehensive strategy and strong performance, but limited or targeted global penetration, which will be compared more directly to others with similar perspectives.

Dimensions of Analysis

The following parameters are tracked in this analysis: Strategy reflects the degree to which a vendor has the market understanding and strategic intent that are at the forefront of market direction. That includes providing the capabilities that customers want in the current offering and recognizing where the market is headed. The strategy evaluation includes: ● Product ● Product strategy ● Market understanding and how well product roadmaps reflect that understanding ● Marketing ● Management team, including time in the job and understanding of the market

Performance represents a vendor’s effectiveness in executing its defined strategy. This includes selling and supporting the defined product offering or service. The performance evaluation includes: ● Awareness: Market awareness of the firm and its product. ● Customer experience: Feedback on the product, installs, upgrades and overall satisfaction. ● Viability: Financial viability of the provider as measured by financial statements. ● Pricing and Packaging: Is the offering priced and packaged competitively?

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

● Product: The mix of features tied to the frequency and quality of releases and updates. ● R&D: Investment in research and development as evidenced by overall architecture.

Reach is a measure of the global capability that a vendor can deliver. Reach can have one of three values: national, international or global. Being able to offer products and services in one of the following three regions is the third dimension of the Globe analysis: ● Americas (North America and Latin America) ● EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) ● APAC (Asia Pacific: including but not limited to Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, Singapore, etc.)

The market reach evaluation includes: ● Sales and support offices worldwide ● Time zone and location of support centers ● Support for languages ● References in respective hemispheres ● Data center locations

The Four Sectors of the Globe

The Globe is segmented into four sectors, representing high and low in both the strategy and performance dimensions. When the analysis is complete, each vendor will be in one of four groups: leaders, contenders, innovators or specialists. We define these as follows: ● Leaders have comprehensive strategies that align with industry direction and market demand, and effectively perform against those strategies. ● Contenders have strong performance, but more limited or less complete strategies. Their performance positions them well to challenge for leadership by expanding their strategic focus. ● Innovators have strong strategic understanding and objectives but have yet to perform effectively across all elements of that strategy. ● Specialists fulfill their strategy well, but have a narrower or more targeted emphasis with regard to overall industry and user expectations. Specialists may excel in a certain market or vertical application.

Digital Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2021-24 July 15, 2021

Inclusion Criteria

The inclusion criteria for this Aragon Research Globe is - a minimum of $6 million in primary revenue for contact center or a minimum of $8 million in revenue in a related market (voice, video conferencing, collaboration, and team collaboration/messaging). - Shipping product. Product must be announced and available. - Customer References. Vendor must produce customer references in each hemisphere that the vendor participates in.

Aragon Research evaluates markets and the major technology providers that participate in those markets. Aragon makes the determination about including vendors in our Aragon Research Globes with or without their participation in the Aragon Research Globe process. This determination was not applied to this report as all vendors participated in the Globe process.

New vendors included in this report:

● Fuze ● Intermedia

Noteworthy vendors not included in this report:

The following vendors were not included in the report but are notable: ● Amazon o Amazon offers its Amazon Connect Contact Center which focuses on enabling enterprises to build their own applications using Amazon AWS services. ● Google o Google is a leading provider of unified communications and collaboration. Its contact center AI offering is leveraged by a number of ICC providers in this report. ● Nextiva o Nextiva is an innovator in unified communications and collaboration and resells Five9’s contact center ● RingCentral o RingCentral resells the NICE contact center offering.

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● Lifesize o Serenova is now part of Lifesize and has a cloud contact center offering. ● Twilio o Twilio launched Twilio Flex Contact Center in October 2018. It is currently focused on acquiring customers.