Patrick was joined by special guests Dominic Black, Cliff Warder and Craig Walker for this roundtable discussion.
Firstly Patrick asks Dominic, who is a Senior Analyst at Cavell Group, to set the scene and explain why CPaaS platforms are becoming increasingly important throughout the industry.
Dominic tells Patrick that CPaaS platforms have the capability to transform an organisation’s provision of communications technology systems. The markets development has really accelerated over the last five years.
This growth has also engendered an atmosphere of consolidation and acquisitions within the market, where established providers are aiming to create more holistic unified communication portfolios. Dominic runs through some of the examples from the industry where this has occurred and looks at why it is happening.
“I think what the providers are realising here is that enterprises want to be able to buy all their communications, and make sure they are all embedded and all integrated together. Being able to get that form one provider is becoming more important.”
Patrick asks Craig Walker, who is VP for Cloud Services in Europe for ALE, if this is the kind of trend that they have been seeing with their customers. Craig explains that the desire to bring a selection of ‘best of breed’ platforms together is a huge motivation for businesses. CPaaS provision enables organisations to have that oversight across all of their communications platforms.
Cliff Warder, Global Director for Analyst Relations at ALE, agrees and examines one of the major the benefits of CPaaS, which is the integration possibilities for customers. The enterprise is now able to completely tailor and integrate a selection solutions to suit their unique set of business needs.
The problem of Shadow IT is still a huge concern for organisations and the guys explain that CPaaS can negate this issue by utilising the most effective applications in each area to ensure user’s requirements are satisfied by sanctioned platforms.
“IT teams now have mechanism to bring the business systems back under control – if you have got a CPaaS platform or indeed a CPaaS strategy, you will be able to take these applications and be able to get the management, the oversight and the control.” – Craig Walker
ALE have approached their own CPaaS provision from a unique angle. Both Craig and Cliff recognise that, in such a well established organisation such as ALE, change was required and they began development of their own platform Rainbow from scratch. Cliff explains that the flexibility offered by Rainbow can be hugely beneficial for enterprise developers.
“It consists of over 200 APIs that developers can download and play around with. There is no big commitment, it’s a case of play and see if it works for your business.”
Craig and Cliff then provide some examples of how their customers have been using the Rainbow platform to create truly innovative solutions that have allowed them to be disruptive within their own market verticals.
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Presenter and Tech Journalist Patrick Watson and special guests Dominic Black, Cliff Warder and Craig Walker.
