CANADIAN ACD/CONTACT CENTRE MARKET REPORT

2008 EDITION

NBI/Michael Sone Associates
193 Church Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5B 1Y7
Telephone 416-360-0424
e-mail msone@nbicanada.com

June 2008

At over 130 pages and examining the period 2006-2010, the Canadian ACD Market Report, 2008 Edition describes the $130-million Canadian market for automatic call distribution (ACD) and associated in-bound contact centre products.

Our popular Market-At-a-Glance presentation summarizes vital statistics about the overall market size and manufacturer shares. This quantitative information is supplemented with qualitative descriptions of market drivers and trends. As well, profiles of the leading manufacturers active in the Canadian market — 3Com, Alcatel-Lucent, Aspect, Avaya, Cintech, Cisco, Computer Talk, Genesys, Mitel, Nortel and Siemens — discuss each company’s product strategy, marketing activities and distribution capabilities. These profiles are buttressed with exhibits quantifying system and agent position shipments, system-size segmentation, shipments by province, shipments by vertical industry, installed base and revenues for each manufacturer. An additional 21 exhibits in the Market Detail section provide aggregated information on revenue, system & station shipments, system-size segmentation, provincial & vertical market shipments and installed base.

Since yesterday’s ACD-based call centres have evolved to encompass the many means by which a customer or prospective customer can interact with an enterprise — telephone, facsimile,
e-mail, web chat, instant messaging and mail correspondence — we include multi-channel products in this report. Where the term "call centre" is used it is either because we are discussing a voice-only product or because a vendor prefers to employ this term when describing its products.

Since no single report can cover the extremely wide spectrum of additional applications used in contact centres, the scope of the 2008 Edition does not encompass workforce management software, CRM systems, telecom expense tracking software or outbound contact centre products such as predictive diallers. While in previous editions of this report we reported business switch integrated ACDs and standalone ACDs separately, we feel IP technology now renders this distinction irrelevant and have adjusted the report accordingly. Please note that this report does not include hosted contact centre services offered by service providers.

This report, together with others on KTS/PBX/IP-PBX telephony systems, Ethernet LAN switches, voice mail, unified messaging, videoconferencing, and data and Internet networking sectors comprises NBI/Michael Sone Associates’ research on the Canadian CPE market. As with all our reports, information has been gathered from primary sources, primarily the manufacturers themselves.

Finally, reported revenues are in Canadian dollars (unless otherwise indicated) at end-user retail levels (rather than manufacturer wholesale levels) and represent proceeds from the sale of ACDs and other closely associated products as described above in the Canadian market only. Local area networks, servers, business telephone systems and other such equipment is excluded with the exception of servers when integrated server/software systems are sold as an integrated “appliance”. Reported revenues also exclude the sales of add-on applications such as CRM and workforce management, consulting or professional services fees, installation, maintenance contracts and service revenues for operational charges related to moves/adds/changes. All figures are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted.