Latin America. The communications platform as a service (CPaaS) came to life in 2016. This evolving market has a dual nature with different types of customers, products and emerging suppliers. CPaaS, grows at a surprising rate being driven by the robust transactions of IoT, mobile payments, banking, marketing activities, contact centers, telemedicine, among others.
How to understand CPaas?
CPaaS is a cloud-based platform that allows developers to add real-time communication features (voice, video, and messaging) into their own applications without the need to build infrastructure and back-end interfaces. Traditionally, real-time communications (RTC) have been carried out in applications built specifically for these functions.
For example, you can use your pre-designed mobile phone app to dial your bank, but have you ever wondered why you can't video chat a representative directly on your banking app? These dedicated PSTN applications, to the traditional phone, such as Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp, etc., have been the benchmark for a long time and demonstrate how expensive it is to build and operate various communications platforms, from real-time network infrastructure to interfaces and programming language.
According to an IDC study, investment in CPaaS will have reached USD $8.2 trillion by 2021. CPaaS allows companies to build or integrate communications into their business models. Do you need to send messages to your customers? Receiving calls from customers, playing messages for them and having them select an option? Connect with sales reps? when using CPaaS the options are endless.
The time to migrate is now
Kevin Nethercott, Vice President of Business Development (CPaaS) at Telestax, said: "CPaaS is revolutionizing the way enterprises deliver real-time communications applications and services on demand, from call tracking, marketing, live chat, videos and notifications. Your enterprise customers want to provide services that meet market expectations. And because CPaaS applications rely on telecom services, most turn to their current service provider to meet their needs."
BroadSoft's service providers and channel partners worldwide have the right tools and applications to meet the needs of large enterprises with regional and global sales support based on BroadSoft Business, a fully integrated enterprise portfolio of cloud PBXs, unified communications, team collaboration, and contact center applications, delivered in the cloud that provides contextual intelligence across the platform so users can access the information and applications they need in one place.
Against this background, BroadSoft highlights different advantages of using CPaaS in a business communications model:
Cost savings: CPaaS providers can use cloud-based technology to offer businesses of any size the ability to develop and integrate real-time communication functions. Development teams using CPaaS can save costs on human resources, infrastructure, and time to market.
New cost-effective communication schemes: Importantly, developers can pay only for the services they need, such as SMS, video, or screen sharing. A CPaaS also allows you to have a Multi-tenant service (ability to allow multiple customers to use the service at the same time), each within a separate and secure environment.
Specialized Technical Support: Developers can use tutorials, guides, and online forums to find the answers they need or access live support 24/7. Finally, a CPaaS allows developers to focus on building their applications rather than additional IT infrastructures.
The growth of the CPaaS market aligns with emerging trends in customer communications. The need for contextual communications is one of the major drivers of the CPaaS market as businesses seek to improve the overall customer experience. Some common apps include: video help desks, SMS appointment reminders, and authentication services. The consolidation of the CPaaS market is an indicator that traditional communications service providers are trying to maintain control as barriers to RTC application development come down.
We can then conclude that, for service providers, the CPaaS market is an opportunity to increase revenue and build relationships with companies that want to expand beyond traditional telephony applications. And on the other hand, for companies, CPaaS is an opportunity to create custom applications and business processes at low cost. Flexibility and scalability can be very attractive for tech companies looking to differentiate their offerings from other competitors.
Text written by Héctor Sánchez, Vice President of Sales for BroadSoft in Latin America.
