Over the past 12 months, NICE enjoyed a 35 percent surge in annual recurring revenue (ARR) across its enterprise CCaaS business.
In other words, the number of customers it bills over $1MN for its CXone CCaaS platform has grown by over a third.
Moreover, NICE recorded a 48 percent year-over-year (YoY) increase in new customer portfolio deals.
Sharing these results during an earnings call, Barak Eilam, CEO of NICE, stated:
We are the clear [market] leader with CXone, having the largest customer base by far and serving the most complex enterprises at scale.
Supporting this argument, NICE CXone is one of only two CCaaS platforms with over a million users – with Genesys Cloud CX recently reaching this milestone too.
Meanwhile, many analysts agree that NICE is a leader in the crowded market.
In the past year, Forrester, Ventana Research, and – most recently – Gartner have awarded NICE this “leader” status in their annual market evaluations.
Of course, there are competitors. Genesys, Five9, and AWS are also vendors that keep cropping up at the forefront of prominent market studies.
Yet, while some may enter the fray – and some may drop out – Steve Blood, VP & Analyst of the Gartner Sales & Customer Service Practice, suggested that such a leading pack is a sign of what’s to come in CCaaS.
Indeed, a previous CX Today article quotes Blood as stating:
As it matures, the CCaaS market will emulate legacy premises – a few major providers and a long tail of smaller companies specializing in regions or verticals.
Eilam’s take on the direction of CCaaS is similar. “We are only now reaching the enterprise adoption cycle of cloud in the CX market,” he noted. “With extremely high barriers to entry, only a few players will emerge.”
To this point, Eilam suggested that it’s not only the conventional on-premise vendors from which NICE is now winning deals.
In addition, NICE is winning business from fellow CCaaS vendors – with an emphasis on those supporting hybrid contact center environments. Eilam continued:
We are seeing a tremendous increase in the number of vendors we are displacing in each new customer win.
The CEO then shared several examples. For instance, he noted: “[We supported] a major international hotel chain in Asia replacing multiple legacy and cloud incumbents due to the lack of complete portfolio, and [in] a large U.S. home and security company, we converged nine different siloed solutions onto CXone.”
As NICE and its closest competitors routinely secure such significant deals and a leading CCaaS pack emerges – increased market consolidation may follow.
That would involve more moves like NICE’s acquisition of LiveVox in October.
Eilam also spoke to that acquisition, pinpointing how it fits into NICE’s long-term strategy. He said:
The combination of CXone with ContactEngine, which we acquired two years ago, and the upcoming addition of LiveVox creates a conversational AI powerhouse for both inbound and outbound CX.
Eilam recently sat down with CX Today to share more on this acquisition and NICE’s direction. Check out the insightful video interview here.
