Addressing a recent Contact Centre in the Cloud executive forum in Sandton, South Africa, Interactive Intelligence’s Manager, Sales Operations for Africa, Deon Scheepers, said that enterprises in fast-growing regions across Africa were rapidly moving their contact centres to the cloud, or simply building new contact centres in the cloud. This is in line with global trends, he said, with cost efficiencies and scalability of the cloud, as well as new demands from consumers driving enterprises to look to moving their contact centres to the cloud. Globally, Interactive Intelligence has reported a compound annual growth rate of 67% in cloud seats between 2010 and 2013, topping 20,000 seats. Last year, Interactive Intelligence saw cloud-based orders increase 87% percent compared to the previous year.

In Africa, key growth centres such as Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa are fast moving to cloud solutions.  “Interestingly, we are also speaking to a number of financial institutions in Ethiopia, where there are indications that legislation is being put in place to compel financial institutions to open their own contact centres within the next two years,” he said.

Andre le Roux, African region Managing Director for Interactive Intelligence, adds: “We are doing a huge amount of work to push into the African market, and we are already securing large financial customers in regions like Nigeria.” Le Roux noted that across Africa, the biggest challenges in doing business are “identifying opportunities, then going to sell it to the market, and getting your money.” “Having a local partner significantly improves your chances of successfully concluding business in Africa,” he said.” And we are honoured to work with MTN in South Africa to deliver cloud services to those organisations who wish to take advantage of this offering.”

While North America still delivers the bulk of Interactive Intelligence’s business, EMEA is a growing market for the company, said le Roux. “We have taken market share from our competitors across the region, and we expect to see a strong increase in business from EMEA – specifically Africa,” he said. Cloud deployments are expected to make up the biggest proportion of new orders in the region.