Author name: Christian Joseph

As CX environments become increasingly complex and sophisticated, CX Observability solutions will become more critical.

1) CX environments face a major challenge ahead of them as they manage multiple stacks of cloud applications. With the growth of AI Agents, Voice AI, and other new applications, ensuring these technologies run smoothly to prevent failures is essential. Agents operate remotely, and parts of operations are outsourced, increasing the complexity within contact centre operations. Many testing tools are available for IT teams, including those that handle regression testing, network testing, performance testing, and more. But is that sufficient?

2) CX Observability goes a step further. The IT and CX teams use the data to understand ‘how’ and ‘why’ these changes occur. It enables them to access real-time insights into customer and agent experiences through continuous monitoring of experiential, operational, and technical data! Some of these data points include CPU and memory usage, browser activity, response times, voice interaction durations, hold times, call transfers, latency, execution times, and others. Having this data in real-time, along with an understanding of what’s happening at the network and infrastructure level, is equally important. It’s also crucial to analyse agent behavior and combine that with technical data from agent workstations to understand, for example, why poor experiences are occurring. The correlation between agent behaviour and the technical aspects of performance will become more important than ever as AI applications usage increases within the contact centre. This holistic view of monitoring gives teams the BIG picture and how to unpack the hidden insights across technical, operational, and experiential data—all in real-time.

I recently caught up with Romilly Blackburn, the CEO of Operata, a company witnessing good growth in the CX Observability space. He explained how a major bank in the UK was struggling to manage a complex technology environment that included multiple IVR systems, several BPOs, remote agents in different locations, and various VDIs (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). The bank was unsure how to resolve these technical and operational challenges and turned to Operata for help.

This is a growing space, and there are niche and specialised vendors in this space. Cyara, IR, and Nectar are expanding their offerings. Cisco, through its Cisco ThousandEyes solution, is able to help enterprises overcome these complexities.

With AI being at the core of every Contact Center discussion, Hyperscalers will have an edge in the AI and Contact Centre race!

We are now in an AI-first world, and this will dominate every contact centre discussion. It is no longer about CCaaS or Cloud Migration. That is a thing of the past as the pace of innovation to have AI as the single orchestration layer that sits across the contact centre takes centre stage.

Many of the current solutions in the market do not address that. For many of these solutions, AI has been acquired to improve some part of the offering. What we are seeing now taking place is a fundamental shift in how buyers have to think about choosing to work with a vendor. Generative AI must be baked into WFM, WEM, Conversational AI, Knowledge, and others to drive unified agent and customer experiences. This means that it is ONE orchestration layer to allow for data to be fed into the AI at the core of the platform. From there, the Contact Centre solution works harmoniously to deliver the desired outcomes

As CIOs look to evaluate a Contact Centre vendor, AI will be at the foundation of how it cuts across cloud, data, IaaS, PaaS and other enterprise priorities. The Hyperscalers, which include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google, will be watched closely. While the contact centre decision remains a smaller part of the equation for the CIO, the move to have autonomous agents in delivering outcomes across HR, IT, Legal, Finance, and many other departments will also mean that the strategy will permeate the contact centre.

Hyperscalers come with that ability to be the ‘anchor’ in the Contact Centre orchestration layer across cloud, data, and the contact centre is part of this layer from the ground up. The data is looked at holistically across the platform. LLM’s are only as good as the data it is fed. With a platform where AI is the central engine, the data is harmonized, constantly updated across the platform, and stored in a single central location.

This will be the advantage hyperscalers bring to the contact centre space. In the Asia Pacific region, AWS is a disruptive force in the contact centre market and have demonstrated how CIOs and CX decision makers see the relevance in working with a Hyperscaler. Microsoft, although a new kid on the block, is a sleeping giant and they will soon be scaling their presence across the Asia Pacific region.

With the increased Cloud Momentum, the On-premises and Hybrid Market for Contact Centre and Enterprise Collaboration in the APAC region remains relevant.

While there has been good cloud momentum and growth in the ANZ market for Contact Centre and Workplace Collaboration, the on-premises market is still relevant in the APAC region. It still stands at about 50-60% (depending on which analyst report you read) and many of these markets include the ASEAN region, North Asia, India, Japan and South Korea.

Many of these large customers operate in mission-critical industries and are not ready to fully transition to cloud-based communications because of the sensitivity and nature of their businesses. These industries include Mining, Oil and Gas, Emergency Services, Hospitals, Investment Banks, Police, Federal and State Government agencies, and many others. These customers have the responsibility to ensure business continuity for citizens and customers in the event of a sudden disaster. Maintaining fallback options like TDM and on-premises services for Voice remains a key part of their requirements.

Vendors, including Cisco, Avaya, and Mitel, are addressing these requirements across the APAC region by offering customers various options for their contact center and workplace collaboration needs. They provide a hybrid strategy for enterprise customers, allowing them to maintain control while leveraging innovations in the cloud. Cisco’s strengths, for example, include the ability to offer high levels of security, observability, and reliability through its acquisition of Cisco ThousandEyes and Splunk. For customers in these mission-critical sectors, that is important. Mitel is investing and supporting its customers in the APAC market through a hybrid CC and UC strategy. Avaya’s Infinity platform, which supports multiple architectures, will support MCP (Model Context Protocol) (MCP) later this year. MCP, created by Anthropic, will allow AI models to securely interact with external tools, data sources, APIs, and user context. As part of this initiative, Avaya is collaborating with Databricks.


In some cases, there have been cloud-to-hybrid transitions, and this could become important as AI becomes more widespread. Many customers across APAC in mission-critical industries want to innovate and benefit from AI. Due to data sensitivity, privacy concerns, operating in highly regulated business environments, and a duty to citizens, they are likely to avoid relying solely on a fully cloud-based architecture in the coming years. They will want to deploy a hybrid enterprise solution.

The NiCE acquisition sends out various signals to the industry. Contact Centre vendors have to rethink their AI strategy!

1) NiCE did an outstanding job last week by acquiring NiCE Cognigy, which pioneered advances in AI, including Agentic AI, even when it was still in its early stages. It was a master class act by NiCE, as although NiCE remains one of the largest vendors in the Contact Center space, they recognized that they lacked a comprehensive AI orchestration layer to stand out in this AI race. With this acquisition, they will undoubtedly be a strong contender in the AI CX race!

2) This acquisition looks at how AI could potentially disrupt many of NiCE ‘s own capabilities and, at the same time, get them moving fast by leveraging this acquisition to introduce new capabilities and transform the way they sell into the market.

3) The acquisition means that now NiCE will inherit a team of AI specialists, including AI engineers and AI builders, who are hard to find and even harder to retain! That sole focus on having staff dedicated solely to AI is what most contact centre companies currently lack. Most contact centre vendors have product and tech teams developing capabilities across their suite of applications, from voice to digital and other platforms. This is a significant advantage for NICE. To acquire a team of AI engineers whose sole focus is on accelerating Agentic AI capabilities.

4) Every Contact Centre provider must prioritise AI. This should not be an add-on from previous acquisitions, but AI should be the centerpiece that connects all applications in delivering outcomes.

5) Thinking about this carefully will be important as competition begins to rise from hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google, with AI at the core of their contact center innovation. Additionally, new groups of competitors are emerging, focusing on autonomous agents and deeply integrating agentic workflows to their stack of solutions, including players like ServiceNow and Salesforce.

6) The NiCE acquisition of Cognigy also means that there are many great AI vendors in the market that can help contact center vendors shape and develop their strategy around being an AI-first CX vendor. Some of these companies include Kore.ai, boost.ai, and many more.

7) Is this the time to re-evaluate how you are positioning yourself as a Contact Centre vendor? Is AI now at the core of your offering, and is it on a single platform? Have you developed Agentic capabilities that span all workflows? How are you advancing your solution in Voice AI? How are you preparing customers to gather both structured and unstructured data seamlessly?

This acquisition sparks new shifts and vendors in the CCaaS market will need to reinvent themselves to be the AI frontrunner for their customers!