Noble Insights March 2015 | Page 2

Contact Center Market Shows Increasing Demand for Full-Featured, Flexible, & Reliable Technologies Today’s contact centers have a growing range of technology choices, allowing them to pick the best fit for their business. While the traditional premise model still offers the most value for many organizations, the market has seen a sharp rise in demand and growth for the cloud model over the past few years. Frost & Sullivan* predicts the total North American market for cloud contact center solutions is growing at 11.6 percent a year, and expects to see an increasing interest in international markets where cloud adoption has been slower to take hold. The cloud model has evolved to become a viable model for a number of companies. Cloud solutions can help companies save costs, increase flexibility, and ‘future-proof’ their technology platforms. Once the leading driver, the financial benefits of moving costs from capital to operating expenses continue to play a key role. However, today’s enterprises can also benefit from a wide range of advantages offered by the cloud model, including: reduced hardware footprint and maintenance; flexibility and scalability; faster deployment; and ease of support for remote sites and agents. Concerns from early cloud products regarding security, functionality, continuity, and control have diminished through platform improvements. For companies looking at cloud platforms, full-suite cloud solutions deliver greater total cost of ownership (TCO) savings than best-of-breed cloud products with limited functionality. Companies can also benefit from selecting a vendor that offers both on-premise and cloud options, as these providers can present increased flexibility and integration for enterprises that do not want to be locked in to one model or the other. Since introducing our enterprise-strength cloud solution in 2011, Noble Systems has seen the rapidly growing appeal of full-suite cloud contact center applications firsthand. While demand for our premise solutions remains strong, one-third of our new sales in 2014 were on the cloud platform and total cloud revenues grew by 79%. Driven by this growth, we also achieved a significant milestone with our Noble® Enterprise Cloud platform, as Noble’s cloud solution client base surpassed the one billion call run rate mark in cloud calls processed. More importantly, Noble Systems delivered a total uptime percentage of greater than 99.999% across all of its cloud network, providing the high availability performance that is critical to clients’ operations. This reliability was achieved through Noble Systems’ deployment of an enterprise-class infrastructure and is supported by the design of the Noble cloud software, which allows for multiple levels of redundancy. We are pleased with the results that we have had from our entry into the cloud segment and are excited by the engagement of new clients. Noble Systems’ offering of true enterprise alternatives for both premise and cloud environments, and our focus on delivering a superior level of service, demonstrate our commitment to providing flexible solutions that fit our clients’ unique business needs. Noble’s innovative technologies and rock-solid performance and availability are key to helping our users achieve their goals. To learn more about Noble’s enterprise-class premise, cloud, and hybrid premise/ cloud contact center solutions, contact your account manager. *Source: Frost & Sullivan, Cloud Contact Center Market Trends: Movement from Best-of-Breed to Suites Letter from the CEO A Year of Milestones and Great Expectations for the Coming Year 2014 was an exciting year at Noble Systems, from celebrating milestone James K Noble, Jr events such as our 25th anniversary and the opening of a new corporate headquarters, to realizing innovatory developments in our product offers. Throughout this newsletter, you will read about some of these recent highlights. I am confident in saying that there are more to come in 2015. The Noble Cloud user base continues to grow, following market trends that show an increasing adoption rate for the cloud model. Cloud sales made up a significant portion of our new client acquisitions last year. With a full-featured, enterpriseclass solution, Noble’s cloud users get the power of our contact center technologies combined with cost savings and increased flexibility for their operations. But a cloud solution is only effective if it is reliable, and Noble’s cloud services team has worked hard to ensure that our system provides the “five-nines” service level that is critical to performance in the hosted landscape. The high-availability enabled our cloud users to hit a call run rate of over one billion calls. And with the extension of our cloud platform to the APAC region this year, and growing cloud acceptance in EMEA, we expect our cloud business to remain a prominent part of our business strategy. Our product development group continues to build innovative tools that solve our clients’ business needs, such as the CallTech Total Con tact feature, which identifies the best time to contact customers using wireless and landline numbers. With increased regulations, such as TCPA wireless dialing rules, creating better contact strategies is more crucial than ever to maintaining high productivity. New tools for IVR management, including automated speech recognition for call routing and IVR in-call recording, are included in our new Maestro upgrade. For multichannel communications, a new messaging component and web chat support are coming soon. The labors of our development team are enhanced by the work of our intellectual property group. Per employee, Noble Systems filed more patents over the past two years than IBM, Google, or Apple. Our patent attorneys and the entire Noble team work together to identify pioneering technologies to grow our IP holdings, helping to protect our investments and yours. Our annual SNUG conference series is quickly approaching, and I am looking forward to meeting with our clients in this energizing environment. The chance to share Noble’s achievements and introduce our latest products, and to watch our users exchange their knowledge and experiences, is a rewarding undertaking, and one which invigorates our entire team. We hope to see you there!