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Here at 4PSA we love to hear that businesses big and small are embracing the cloud. There’s this general misconception that only the IT department can fully assess its benefits, or the need to make the transition. Today more than ever, black suits are well versed in these matters too, according to new research.

A survey carried out by ContactBabel reveals that cloud adoption in contact centers – moving away from legacy phone systems and towards hosted PBX – is now triggered at an executive level. No longer is the IT department the only group of people that understands the vast benefits of cloud computing.

The firm polled 186 call centers in the UK and found that in 90 percent of the cases, the CTO had “considerable or great influence” with regards to the decision. The CEO was mentioned in a similar context 70 percent of time.

Generally speaking, the cloud poses tremendous advantages. But for contact centers in particular, the decision to move operations to the cloud results in:

• reduced expenditures
• an agile, scalable business that keeps up the pace with every trend
• less hassle when adopting new hardware
• an uptick for everything in between

30 percent of those surveyed said the top benefit was cheaper IT maintenenance and implementation. A quarter of those polled said the “speed” of implementing changes and new functionality was key to their success. And about 20 percent cited “easier integration” (compared to on-premise solutions). Finally, 55 percent of those still stuck with legacy systems pledged to hop on the cloud bandwagon by 2020.

Most of the polled firms have already implemented cloud functionality in one form or another, according to Steve Morrell, analyst at ContactBabel, Coupled with the fact that around two-thirds plan to put their operations in the cloud in the next five years, “the trend towards cloud adoption seems unstoppable for a large part of the contact center industry,” he said.