As an engineer by trade and former software developer, I’ve been fascinated by the CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service) market. Why? Because regardless of the promise of ease of use and agility CPaaS platforms claim to offer, the technology, tools, skillsets, and interactions required to deliver the desired outcome are all dependent upon people that have similar training and education as myself.
Cisco is changing the CPaaS market by allowing businesses to focus not on the mechanics, but on the experience of building CPaaS powered applications.
The current CPaaS market
The CPaaS market is a rapidly growing technology area valued at over $4 billion growing to roughly $17 billion by 2024 according to IDC. What’s astonishing about the CPaaS market is not just the expected growth, but also the promise that CPaaS based applications can connect businesses and their customers closer than ever before.
CPaaS represents a set of cloud-based communications services that provide the building blocks for enabling voice, video, rich messaging, artificial intelligence, and analytics into the applications we experience every day. Think about when you used video to conduct a virtual healthcare appointment with your doctor or you used a real-time two-way chat bot to request an insurance quote from an insurance provider. Those individual interactions combine into ongoing, daily, digital interactive experiences powered by CPaaS applications in the cloud.
Solving the current CPaaS Problem
Even with the growth of the market and the promise of successful business outcomes, current developer only CPaaS technology still has a problem. In its current form, it is simply too complex for businesses to easily consume. Those that build CPaaS-based applications are disconnected from the end user experience. They build and integrate CPaaS-based applications on a use-case basis, with each application having its own APIs and integrations.
This causes developers and architects to spend too much time managing the code, infrastructure and integrations required to power hundreds of disconnected single-purpose applications, instead of focusing on business outcomes. As a result, the implementation of CPaaS for interacting and engaging with customers is relegated to software development teams who get bogged down in the mechanics of CPaaS; resulting in a customer experience that doesn’t match what the business originally envisioned.
Cisco Webex Connect
Announced at WebexOne, Webex Connect is the integration of the imimobile CPaaS capability into the Webex portfolio. Webex Connect is an Enterprise CPaaS platform that provides a single point of orchestration for automating communication journeys end-to-end. Our strategy is to invite everyone, including developers, business analysts, product management and marketing to manage their part of the customer experience.
Webex Connect is a fully featured CPaaS platform and with the recent acquisition of imimobile, Cisco is also an SMS aggregator. The Webex Connect platform abstracts away the complexity of building and managing CPaaS applications. It offers an extended toolset that caters to a broad set of business users, developers, architects and analysts and enables them to accelerate and optimize digital innovation.
By leveraging the Webex Connect visual flow builder, extended low-code toolset and pre-built capabilities, your business can quickly build customer digital experiences that seamlessly integrate with your customer and partner-facing applications and processes.
But don’t just take my word for it, check out the Enterprise CPaaS Buyers guide for customer stories and case studies. In addition, check out Webex Connect to learn more.
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