- Concerns over Overheated Competition, Dumping Sales on Rise
Market to Expand to \800 Bil. by 2008
- Domestic Makers Struggling Hard
by Lee Kwang- jae, Repoter / voxpop@ittimes.co.kr
The IT industry is a major growth engine for the Korean economy. The domestic IT industry's growth rate has been unmatched by any others in recent years. So far, no surprises.
But since the domestic economic slowdown in 2001, the IT industry growth rate has remained at a standstill or started to slide. Telecommunications device companies and network service firms are facing harder times than server, storage and other industrial software makers.
These companies are striving to reinvigorate the market. In particular, network and telecommunications device firms at home and abroad are focusing on the IT telephony sector which embraces IP(Internet Protocol) contact centers and IP phone businesses.
IP contact centers, which started at life insurance firms such as Samsung Life Insurance Co. and Kyobo Life Insurance Co., last year boldly expanded their business scope to media and game companies as well as other financial companies and public organizations. Telecommunications carriers such as KT entered the market and have eagerly explored small and medium-sized companies for IT contact center business.
To catch up with the rising market, device and solution makers have put new products for IT contact centers in the market, including those for small and medium-sized firms and solutions available for a single person. Now, the IP contact center market shows signs of resurrection, led by large companies in the financial and public sectors, after it faced sluggishness following the Daehyun Project last year.
The improvements in speech quality of IP phones and implementation of a relevant law, led to optimism: The industry is forecast to get on the right growth track after the second half of this year. In conjunction with IT contact centers' expansion to more diverse areas of business, the IP phone market is expected to gain strength.
Below, we analyze the major issues and problems of the domestic IT telephony market which will lead to the full-fledged "usage" phase from the current "recognition" phase.
