Analysts Shedding Light on the Skype for Business Contact Center Market

The Skype for Business contact center market finally has the research that it deserves. Gartner recently published the August 2016 Market Guide for Microsoft Skype for Business Contact Center Partners, which gives a comprehensive overview of the products in the market and the method each uses interacting with Skype for Business.

Years ago, we invented the first native contact center product for Lync. We have long known Skype for Business is an ideal platform for contact centers and it's great to finally see substantive research published for this growing and important market (see also the excellent Nemertes paper, Skype for Business and Contact Center, published in late 2015).

The most important piece of these reports are details about how various contact center products are built for – or connect to – Skype for Business. Namely, the report defines what it means to be "native," "integrated" and "connected," what the benefits are, and which providers actually provide such solutions.

Clarity Connect is listed as a Representative Vendor for its native integration with Skype for Business solutions in the Gartner report. Native contact centers offer a host of benefits, including stability, ease of maintenance, ease of use, and employee mobility. In addition, native products take full advantage of core capabilities of Skype for Business including presence, IM, and screen sharing. This facilitates internal collaboration for helpdesk use cases, and well as quick access to subject-matter experts for escalation in a contact center use case. (“The Collaborative Contact Center” by Blair Pleasant gives great insight into the latter).

We’re excited that people finally have solid, authoritative answers to many of the questions we’ve frequently heard over the last five years. Gartner subscribers can access the Market Guide report here. If you want to learn more about our native approach to Skype for Business visit the Clarity Connect website.

Jon Rauschenberger is the CTO at Clarity, the developer for Clarity Connect, a contact center native to Skype for Business. Clarity delivers premier products and solutions that leverage Lync and Skype for Business as a communication platform, which allow companies to significantly reduce costs and complexities within their IT environments.

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