TEKTALK STRATEGY

Strategic Focus: Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS)

What Is CPaaS?

According to TechTarget, CPaaS enables enterprises to build or integrate communications into business workflows. Need to send messages to customers? Use CPaaS. Need to receive calls from customers, play messages for them and have them select an option? Use CPaaS. Need to call customers and connect them with sales reps? Use CPaaS. The options are endless.

Why Is CPaaS Important?

In general, CPaaS helps businesses get more from their communications infrastructure by acting as a foundation upon which developers can integrate a variety of applications — think adding voice, video calling, or messaging to another application or capability. Also, enhancing existing voice, video or messaging. APIs allow businesses to expand their offerings without the need of additional hardware or software. CPaaS lets companies arrange their communications in a way that better addresses business processes and customer needs, providing a superior end-user experience. It also saves money as custom “ground-up” development is no longer necessary. Developers integrate easier and faster, which means less billable hours, faster deliverables and less complexity for future tweaks.

What Kind of Customers Use CPaaS?

Again referencing TechTarget – Two types of customers consume CPaaS: the long tail and the enterprise. The long tail includes developers working in their garage, university students running pet projects or companies with savvy IT departments that have development capabilities. In this domain, vendors need to capture a large number of users and monetize a fraction of them who then run their communications at large scales.

The enterprise poses a different challenge. It is a high-touch market, where more interaction and support is required. Market education is needed as enterprises shift from on-premises services to the cloud and anything as a service. In many cases, the communication volume requirements for enterprises are lower than long-tail customers, but this also makes enterprise needs more predictable.

How does pricing/partner compensation work?

In many cases, pricing is based on the number of individual communications. For example, sending a million short messages in the U.S. via one CPaaS provider will cost a certain amount. Volume discounts might kick in at 5 million messages a month.

Nexmo™ – CPaaS from Vonage

The recent Vonage® strategic acquisition of Nexmo™, a leader in Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS), is creating a new opportunity for Vonage partners/customers to leverage cloud-based communications across a wider spectrum of channels. From mobile messaging APIs (for both SMS and Chat Apps), to mobile user authentication, to programmable voice, the Nexmo Platform provides all the building blocks, resources and management tools needed to communications-enable your software applications, on a global scale.

• Video 1 – Nexmo CPaaS from Vonage