Gartner defines the Contact Center Infrastructure market as equipment, software and services that enable organizations to manage multichannel self-service and assisted service customer interactions holistically from a customer experience and an employee engagement perspective. CCI solutions are dedicated to supporting a single customer enterprise or tenant on each instance of the system, even if that customer or tenant supports multiple contact center operations on that dedicated instance. CCI solutions can be deployed on the customer’s premises or can be hosted and managed in a third-party data center or private cloud.
Gartner defines global WAN services as points-of-presence (POP)-based services supporting multiregional corporate networks. Service providers own and operate their own global core networks and sell directly to the client. Services include transport-centric/unmanaged, managed, and co-managed network services, or network as a service via a monthly fixed or usage-based fee model. These services are measurable and consumable through customer-facing web portals and programmable APIs. Global WAN services consist of backbone network transport and last-mile access connections, providing connectivity to individual enterprise sites such as large offices or remote branches. WAN service providers are also offering more transformational capabilities, such as cloud fabrics and enhanced visibility enabled by the underlay service network, and adding more network-based security functions to their offerings. Ancillary services such as cloud interconnects, managed SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) are now commonly offered. Gartner also sees providers increasingly investing in AI and automation to support more service processes across the WAN service life cycle, from network design to service assurance.
Gartner defines managed hybrid cloud hosting as a standardized, productized hosting offering that combines a cloud-enabled system infrastructure (CESI) platform — consisting of a pool of compute, network and storage hardware — and cloud infrastructure framework software to facilitate self-service and rapid provisioning. It also includes documented and standardized management for either a hyperscale public IaaS platform or a European-country-specific, large-scale IaaS platform in a local language with managed services. The infrastructure platform should be located both in a service provider's data center for the CESI platform as well as in a European country for the public IaaS platform. The geographic focus of this market is Europe.
The managed network services (MNS) market focuses on externally provided, network operations center (NOC) functionality, as well as relevant network and security life cycle services that deliver current and emerging requirements to end users. Gartner defines the MNS market as globally capable providers of remote service management functions for the network and security operations of enterprise networks, including: Managed LAN services (MNS for LAN) Managed WAN services (MNS for WAN) Managed security (MNS for security) functions
Gartner defines strategic cloud platform services (SCPS) as standardized, automated, public cloud offerings integrating infrastructure services (for example, computing, network and storage), platform services (for example, application, data and value-added services such as AI/ML) and transformation services (resources to help customers adopt cloud-oriented IT delivery models). Although owned by the service provider, infrastructure and platform services may be hosted in providers’ infrastructures or customers’ data centers. Services should be elastically scalable, metered by use and consumable via web-based interfaces and programmable APIs. Transformation programs may be delivered by automated, self-service interfaces, and managed interactions facilitated by account teams/partners.