The Best Contact Center Infrastructure: The 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Verified Market Research valued the worldwide contact center infrastructure market, including hardware and software such as automated call distribution, interaction routing, interactive voice response, communications platforms, and much more, at $29.3 billion last year and projects it to reach $83.2 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual rate of 13.9 percent.

The market, which includes technologies to manage and streamline contact center operations via phone, email, chat, text, social media, and other channels, is poised for significant growth, driven by the adoption of cloud-based solutions, the integration of artificial intelligence, and increasing demand for advanced solutions that can provide personalized and efficient customer interactions across multiple channel.

At the same time, the CCI market faces many of the same challenges that have plagued it for years. These include high implementation and maintenance costs (which are coming down thanks to cloud availability) and growing data security and privacy concerns.

The Top Five

8x8, providers of what is already one of the contact center industry’s most integrated platforms, is expanding intelligent automation across its platform and unifying its contact center, communications, and communications APIs into a single, AI-enabled platform, the 8×8 Platform for CX. Once complete, the platform will include an AI-powered cloud contact center, video meetings, team chat, business SMS, virtual agents and self-service, secure payment, workforce management, conversational intelligence, and high-volume messaging. Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, points out that 8x8 is ideal for small to midsize contact centers “that are increasingly looking for a single integrated platform of [unified communications-as-a-service, contact center-as-a-service], and companywide AI.”

With its Amazon Connect suite, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is among “the choices for contact centers with more than 1,000 seats,” according to McGee-Smith. Now AWS is taking that success downstream, having just launched a lightweight version of Amazon Connect for SMBs. The solution, built by AWS partner Digiclarity, is targeted at companies that usually find enterprise tech, like Amazon Connect, too complex or expensive. Those issues aside, analysts continue to praise AWS and Amazon Connect for its AI architecture, innovation around generative AI and large language models, agent desktop and workflow automation, and pricing flexibility with a usage-based model.

Five9 has undergone a lot of internal strife in the past few years, starting with its on-again, off-again acquisition by Zoom; leadership and employee shake-ups, with CEO Mike Burkland as the latest executive to step away from the company; rumors of a pending sale; and disappointing stock market numbers. But the company has managed to turn itself into one of the most prominent names in contact center tech, quite a feat for a startup battling it out in a competitive market that includes much bigger entities like AWS, Genesys, and NiCE.

Genesys in early August collected a $1.5 billion investment from Salesforce and ServiceNow, which it will use to integrate its Cloud CX platform with technologies from those two vendors. That’s a move that Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir, says will help Genesys “bridge the CRM-CCaaS divide.” But even before the influx of cash, Genesys’ CCI offering was already quite powerful. “Genesys’ openness of platform, composable architecture, and expanding ecosystem enable customers to rapidly build, deploy, and adapt their contact center infrastructure to meet evolving business needs,” Wettemann says.

NiCE continues to invest in building out the capabilities of its CXone cloud contact center platform, both organically and through acquisition. Its most recent deal brought in Cognigy, a conversational AI provider, for $955 million, as NiCE seeks to form a more powerful platform for contact centers aiming to integrate AI. But even without Cognigy, NiCE sat comfortably in a CCaaS leadership position. “NiCE is a best fit for brands looking for a proven solution with broad capabilities and a strong track record of success,” Forrester Research said in a recent Forrester Wave report. Analysts also singled out NiCE CXone for its innovation, agent assist tools, agent desktop and workflow automation, back-end system integration, scalability, and reliability.