What Does CPaaS Maturity Look Like?

An overview of the CPaaS market suggests we are still in the early days, meaning there is slow adoption among enterprise leadership, at least according to Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Service Director, Nemertes, who said this in a recent interview:

"We’re seeing about six percent of our research participants currently using CPaaS, so I’d argue that the market is somewhat immature"

When the market does mature, however, what might that look like for vendors across the industry? I posed this question to Lazar, who enlightened me about the future of CPaaS, and what it might look like. I did so because I wanted to gain insight into the world of possibilities the majority of enterprises have yet to explore with CPaaS.

Maturity Means More Options for Business Comms

During our interview, Lazar shared, maturity will mean the broad availability of voice, video, and messaging APIs that enable customers to build communications into native apps. These APIs will even lead to the development of new applications using APIs – meaning enterprises will no longer have to purchase pricey platforms they will only use for one or two features.

“For example, most of the CPaaS adoption we see today is focused on messaging to enable capabilities like sending customer notifications or other texts”

“In a fully mature CPaaS market, we can expect that enterprises could build custom apps using off-the-shelf APIs and only pay for what they need,” he added. This suggests, if enterprises want to build a video-enabled telemedicine app that enables messaging, remote monitoring of sensors, and voice control, they can. It might also imply they could do so without using multiple CPaaS providers – effectively eliminating the need for up-front investments on unified communications platforms.

CPaaS will Support A Growing Remote Workforce

According to Owl Labs, 52 percent of workers on a global scale work from home at least once each week. And CPaaS could play a major role in enabling uncompromised remote work options. Ron Holtdijk, Director of Business Communication, Sennheiser, told me, in the short term, remote work, especially on the contact center front, shows no signs of reduction.

Holtdijk believes remote working is “The new normal for professionals across many industries. The wide adoption of remote work presents new and unique challenges to IT personnel tasked with enabling seamless collaboration despite the distance,” he added. Holtdijk even predicts, in 2020, we will witness even more leading companies that adopt remote work policies. And with this, he says, “IT will shoulder the responsibility of ensuring collaborations and productivity remain uninterrupted.” This, I believe is where CPaaS will shine the most.

If IT managers become advocates for CPaaS, they can ensure remote workers don’t become second-class participants in meetings, and that the quality of communication remains reliable – no matter the circumstance. CPaaS could play a major role in the entire process, from remote worker management, enabling real-time collaboration, to powering the next generation of remote sales, product, and empowering contact center teams that work untethered from all parts of the world.

source uctoday

Industry: Unified Communications