Communications-platform-as-a-Service, or CPaaS, is a relatively new concept, but for anyone trying to harness the ever-growing number of channels and meet the expectations of the modern experience economy and customer, it is increasingly becoming a necessity.
CPaaS refers to a cloud-based platform that lets app developers and technical professionals easily integrate consumable and configurable voice, SMS, e-mail, in-app push, social, and other digital engagement channels into apps and services.
In our experience, the most common factor holding enterprises back from adopting CPaaS is the existence of legacy systems. It’s easy to become comfortable with what you have and fear leveraging cloud-based services but, in truth, it’s always better to have a single united system and, in the long-term, CPaaS will help reduce solution complexity while improving system resiliency by offloading your internally supported communication solutions.
Ensuring a smooth transition to CPaaS
The next step is settling on the right provider. The most important thing as you make that choice, is stability. You want a partner who can offer security and data protection. Ideally, they should have redundancy built into their system, meaning there’s more than one way of securing the exchange of information just in case something goes wrong.
To make the move easier, you’re going to need thorough documentation that allows developers to overcome any obstacles they encounter without having to call someone and ask questions. It sounds simple, but this is often a sore point – so you need a provider with accurate and up-to-date documentation, and ideally examples of code you can follow to familiarise yourself with the platform. Integrated analytics can also help simplify the transition and build stronger relationships and solutions by optimising productivity, performance, and customer experiences that ultimately impact overall ROI.
CPaaS offers you the ability to benefit from data analytic solutions to better understand your business communications transactions by providing data endpoints and tools to easily interact, view, and digest your data. Many cloud solutions being offered today are new to the market, developed quickly, and sometimes lack good process steps. It’s strongly recommended that your solution has successfully completed SOC2 Type II Audit and ISO 27001 certification or equivalent certifications. This will help ensure the reliability, security, and quality of the solution you choose.
Looking ahead
Once the move has been made, the factors which start to become most vital are scalability and flexibility. Even if your operations are currently limited to a single region, you should future-proof your solution by working with a provider who has a broad global footprint – and similarly, is ready to adapt to the next channel or the next solution.
Guest Blog by Sonia Lopez Esquilas, Sales Director, Iberia and Northern Europe and Steve Garcia, Chief Architect, Head of Product and Infrastructure Engineering, SAP Digital Interconnect
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