The cloud/hosted environment is no longer for small-scaled and uncomplicated solutions and for small/midsized firms. Enterprises are now reaching for more and increasingly sophisticated applications reachable via the cloud, including multichannel contact center/customer service software.

Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) offers clear proof of this trend. It has just reported that more than 1,000 firms worldwide have now deployed its Genesys 8 suite in a hosted or software as a service (SaaS (News - Alert)) environments. These companies have tapped into the Genesys product via more than 20 service provider partners. Their ranks including Deutsche Telecom, Echopass, Orange Business Services, Qwest, Teleperformance, Telstra (News - Alert), West, Working Solutions and Verizon.

“The hosted and SaaS market is seeing a tremendous amount of growth,” said Ian Jacobs, senior analyst of customer interaction with Ovum (News - Alert). “Hosted provides a way to extend the enterprise and enable employees outside the contact center to play a role in customer service. Hitting such a milestone is a clear indication of the value to enterprises and more importantly to their customers, of a well integrated on-demand solution.”

Some of the demand for the Genesys (News - Alert) 8 solution comes at the expense of both hosted- and on-premises-licensed competition, Eric Tamblyn, vice president of product marketing at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise told TMCnet. The partner-hosted Genesys solution permits the firm to tap into markets that are seeking such a deployment model, such as governments that cannot afford unexpected installation costs and retail that want flexibility to scale with demand.

“Our competition doesn’t generally offer the flexibility of one solution that spans both hosted and premises,” said Tamblyn.

Enterprise customers are driving a growing popularity in hosted/SaaS models for customer service. Hosted solutions minimize or even eliminate capital expenditures by enabling firms to pay only for what they need on per port, per seat or per minute usage basis to suit their specific needs. Since enterprises outlay funds only for actual use, they no longer have to purchase extra capacity to meet peak periods, eliminating the cost associated with in-house solutions where resources may sit idle in slower periods.

Service providers who offer Genesys hosted solutions to their customers gain from a modular, scalable framework and open platform that allows them to customize and deliver value added services via a secure multi-tenant architecture, reports Alcatel-Lucent. And by using hosted services from service providers, businesses have rapid and affordable access to new technologies as soon as they become available. Current customer investments are protected since the platform can be integrated with existing environments and third-party applications because Genesys hosted solutions are based on open standards.

“We’re thrilled that our Genesys suite has gone beyond the 1,000th hosted customer milestone and our hosted service provider partners continue to add to that number every day as their customers realize the financial and operational benefits this model offers them,” said Tamblyn. “With such a large acceptance of our SaaS and hosted approach, we now are able to address a wide range of vertical markets and customer service needs.”