Where is CPaaS Headed in 2021? Expert Round Table

CPaaS opens up a world of possibilities for organisations (particularly contact centres) to interact with customers on a range of platforms like voice, video, chat, social, etc. without having to build expensive back-end infrastructure. In the last few years, CPaaS has seen meteoric growth, with 81% of companies already deploying some kind of CPaaS by 2017.  

For more stats on CPaaS adoption, check out our 2020 CPaaS statistics and facts roundup. You could also view UC Today’s CPaaS explainer video by Rob Scott here.  

Now, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, CPaaS has important implications for companies looking to engage with audiences through digital platforms and grow their footprint using advanced communication APIs. It would allow contact centres to build bespoke applications and tightly coupled integrations without getting into back-end complexities or requiring a messy infrastructure overhaul.   

To understand where the CPaaS industry is headed in 2021, we spoke to industry experts from Kandy, Sinch, and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.

What Were the Top CPaaS Trends that Shaped 2020?  

Back in 2019, we noted a dramatic growth in the CPaaS sector, already motivated by remote working. For 2020, our experts had predicted the rise of IoT and AI as key driving forces for the sector. This time, we asked the same question – expectedly, it was COVID-19-related WFH that had the strongest impact.  

Predictions around IoT also saw fruition, in addition to a keen focus on data, and communications security. Here is what our experts had to say.  

Kim Jones, Director of Marketing at Kandy Communications, discussed the many ways in which CPaaS reacted to the pandemic, witnessing faster adoption, the abandoning of transactional APIs/SDKs, and a lot of interest around browser-based communication.   

“WFH drove demand for video conferencing and collaboration platform solutions for remote workers,” said Jones, causing an “acceleration of digital transformation initiatives and adoption of RTC such as UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS.” 

She highlighted four standout trends from 2020:  

1. Contact centre enablers - Demand for contact centre as a service and lightweight web-based contact centre solutions that enable easy spin-up as standalone solutions or to complement existing call centres, and/or for remote agents working from home 
2. Healthcare use cases - Telehealth concierge applications with embedded real-time communications, and especially with peer-to-peer video – driven by caregiver-patient interactions under lockdowns or quarantine during the pandemic 
3. New ways to integrate - Transition from the traditional view of a transactional API and SDK model to more of a multi-service digital marketplace model, including pre-built turnkey applications and connectivity services, such as MS Teams, Direct Routing, STaaS, etc.  
4. Web-based access - WebRTC applications such as Live Support that enable browser-based omnichannel communications for the digital transformation of business processes and customer experience 

The focus was on greater flexibility aided by CPaaS technologies.  

Jonathan Bean, CMO, Sinch, agreed on the unprecedented impact of the pandemic, noting that it propelled several organisations to turn to CPaaS as a speedy value generator. This was particularly true for sectors and organisations that put off digitalising their customer communications channels for decades – like banks or financial services providers.  

“Till 2019, most financial institutions were only using mobile messaging for one-time passwords or verification of their users. Suddenly, they had to actually communicate with their customers about things like changes to their loan terms through SMS!” Bean mentioned, highlighting a small instance that signals a much larger tectonic shift.   

2020 was spent playing catch-up for several such organisations. “Because of this, we’ve worked with many financial organisations last year to help them quickly implement simple CPaaS solutions in response to the pandemic,” said Bean.  

Interestingly, the shift wasn’t just to overcome the operational hurdles of communicating in a low touch or touchless landscape. Customer demand has also changed, and without CPaaS, it may not be possible to generate the same ROI from communication investments.  

“Last year we saw the pandemic completely transform consumer behaviour forever. As a result, businesses and organisations had to quickly figure out how to get closer to their employees and customers in this new reality,” Bean said.  

“For many businesses and organisations, this meant having to implement changes they were planning on making in five years but in the space of just five months. Therefore, like all good technology shifts, the deployment of simple CPaaS solutions offering quick ROI and simplicity for businesses and consumers was the biggest trend in 2020.” 

Noel Pierre-Yves, Strategic Marketing Director for Cloud services, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, told us the trends his company observed in 2020 and its tactical response by creating a “Connector’s Factory.” 

 “As Enterprises were trying to cope with the sanitary crisis by facilitating “work from anywhere”, programmable communications and CPaaS have helped enterprises communicate in a more efficient way,” commented Pierre-Yves.  

And it isn’t just about replicating the same communication dynamics in a different location. Pierre-Yves argues that by embedding comms into software that people use every day, it is possible to receive the right information at the right moment with the right (read the least) amount of effort.  

“In that sense, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has created a Connectors Factory so that communications can reach and be used in mainstream software solutions. We also see enterprises eager to see business, IoT and infrastructure delivered directly to people through their favourite communication application in real-time, allowing employees and customers to make better decisions. This convergence of data into the workplace allows the enterprise to simplify work for employees while creating value for their customers and partners,” said Pierre-Yves.   

This transformation of bare-bones or functional communication into data-enriched messages has two implications according to Pierre-Yves.  

First, there are opportunities to automate internal and external workflows, taking off from the data that is shared. Second, security is a major concern: “As communication includes more business data on top of typical text, voice and video communications, security becomes an even more relevant topic to communication APIs.” Pierre-Yves shared with us how Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is planning to preempt security concerns going into 2021.   

“Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise values data security for their customers and is one of the main European platforms in the CPaaS market. We are investing in security around data to ensure data sovereignty for our customers, specifically in European countries”  

Which New Technologies are Creating the Biggest Opportunities?

CPaaS is in a unique position, in that it is a relatively mature market, having been around for several years. However, the pandemic has given it a leg-up that could push growth well beyond any other UC sector average. From $4.54 billion in 2020, CPaaS will be worth $26.03 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of 34.3%. We asked our experts about the technologies creating this incredible opportunity for growth. The answers ranged from ecosystem solutions powered by the cloud to targeted APIs for e-commerce, IT provisioning, omnichannel, etc. 

Interestingly, one expert zeroed in on blockchain as the most game-changing technology-enabler for CPaaS on the road ahead. Read on for the full insights.  

For Kim Jones, the following technologies should be on CPaaS leaders’ and users’ radar:  

• WebRTC 
• Video (P2P and multiparty) 
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) 
• UCaaS in the cloud 
• Ecosystem of real-time comms 

Speaking on WebRTC, Jones said, “WebRTC is now mainstream in all major web browsers, and is frictionless/plugin-less in order to enable ubiquitous use.” WebRTC could be instrumental in extending traditional UCaaS capabilities into specific applications and business processes including contact centre apps, she added.  

In addition to blockchain, AI was the other emerging technology that could unlock opportunities for CPaaS. Jones mentioned that AI-enabled services could make a genuine difference in chatbots, and interactive voice response (IVR), reducing manual dependencies to a large extent. All of this will aid in the creation of a communication ecosystem powered by APIs for voice, video, messaging, chat, rich chat, etc., along with non-comms APIs for security, e-commerce, billing, provisioning, and configuration. 

Finally, like several industry leaders we’ve spoken to in the last few months, Jones mentioned the potential of Microsoft Teams in the CPaaS arena – “MS Teams and DR/DRaaS for Teams could enable dial time access to the PSTN without using Microsoft calling plans.”  

[caption id="attachment_35284" align="alignleft" width="200"] Jonathan Bean[/caption]

Jonathan Bean from Sinch opined that the next few months in CPaaS will be spent in responding to the challenges and opportunities caused by the pandemic, with particular attention on the regional rules of engagement. “The pandemic turned the march towards digital transformation into a stampede and the biggest opportunities were enabled by those technologies which really helped to fast-track the deployment of simple CPaaS use cases,” Bean said.   

Instead of blindly expanding one’s digital footprint, companies should remember the unique modalities of different geographies to capitalise on this opportunity.  

“The pandemic has been a truly global event, with every single country affected to some extent, impacting billions of people worldwide. This has pushed the messaging layer of CPaaS to the fore as businesses and organisations try to engage with employees and customers at scale"

"As a leader in mobile customer engagement, we know that different countries prefer different channels and each has its own rules of engagement,” Bean observed.  

To understand and master each of these channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber and Line across multiple countries takes huge amounts of time.”