Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) is a concept that has seen extraordinary growth over the last couple of years. We’re only at the start of discovering what this flexible technology can do for business leaders, and more companies than ever before are beginning to discover the benefits.
One of the leading providers of CPaaS solutions, ALE (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise), believes that CPaaS is the future of more flexible and innovative environments for customer satisfaction and user experience. ALE’s CPaaS platform, named Rainbow, allows organisations to take their services and solutions to the next level to allow for reduced decision-making times, better customer experiences, and enhanced revenue opportunities too.
I caught up with Pierre-Yves Noel, the Director of Cloud Services and Subscription business models for ALE, to find out more about the solutions that ALE has to offer.
Why is CPaaS Such a Popular Concept?
According to Pierre-Yves, CPaaS is trending today because people believe that it has limitless potential. People can do almost anything with CPaaS because it’s so open and flexible. “There’s so much scalability and opportunity available if you know how to use this technology. It brings real-time communication into the business environment, and transforms the way that companies operate.”
With CPaaS, ALE believes that businesses can make collaboration easier. Companies can use CPaaS solutions to drive incredible transformations in the way that they communicate internally and externally. All today’s companies need to do is figure out which problems they want to solve and use the open environment of CPaaS to work backward towards a solution. The ALE CPaaS offering also offers endless opportunities for companies to scale their capabilities outwards with extra features implemented through API software.
However, the open environment does mean that companies need the right software skills and insights to make the most of the technology.
“CPaaS is just the start, we’re also exploring tools like integration as a service to make accessing these new innovations easier too”
What Did Your Latest Research Reveal
To maintain its position as a pioneer in the CPaaS landscape, ALE invests in regular research into the marketplace. Recently, the company worked with the Wainhouse Research brand to interview more than 300 enterprises in their Heart of Digital Transformation survey. The survey revealed some interesting findings, including that 71% of companies believe that they will be investing in more digital engagement tools within the next 2-3 years.
I asked Pierre-Yves what he thought the biggest findings of the study were. “For us, we’re seeing that CPaaS is changing the way that we talk to customers. For our salespeople and business partners, CPaaS is something that can clearly drive more business value and highlight the potential of digital transformation. CPaaS can bring real business outcomes to customers, and it allows companies to think about how they can transform everyday conversations for end-users.”
There’s a lot of flexibility when it comes to what people can do with CPaaS. Rainbow, the ALE CPaaS solution offers opportunities for companies to increase customer loyalty through a multi-channel communication strategy. Alternative, users can engage customers dynamically using chatbots and other tools to provide a more immersive customer service experience. CPaaS can even help companies to make the most of connected objects by connecting streams of data in the modern workplace.
How Can CPaaS Help Businesses in Practical Terms?
Despite the rising popularity of CPaaS, there are still a lot of companies in the marketplace that don’t fully understand the benefits of this new technology. I was keen to find out how ALE has been helping customers to really succeed with this new technology, in an age where everyone wants to differentiate.
Pierre-Yves told me that ALE is seeing a lot of different use cases for customers experimenting with CPaaS. For instance, “We’re working with one of the biggest banks in Spain right now. They said that they didn’t want desk phones on their desks anymore, which meant they wanted to run everything through mobile. With CPaaS, we could integrate their secure financial environment with services like the option for click-to-call and so on. Here, we’re using CPaaS as a channel for transmitting crucial information. We’re not controlling the PBX, just using Rainbow as a data channel to add new kinds of service.”
Pierre-Yves also noted that there’s a lot of opportunity in the space around verticalising applications. “CPaaS is all about creating the right working environment for today’s companies. It’s about making jobs better and lives easier for users by transmitting and connecting the right data in a business landscape.”
What’s Next for the CPaaS Market
According to ALE, the future is very bright for the CPaaS space.
Pierre-Yves told me that he believes that there’s going to be a lot of opportunity from the arrival of “integration as a service” tools that will help to make accessing CPaaS easier.
“We’ve seen that our partners and customers need help accessing and understanding the value of CPaaS. IaaS allows us to offer ways for people to create simple connections and flows in the background, even if they’re not a developer”
On top of making CPaaS easier to access, ALE will be continuing to explore new ways that CPaaS can transform the marketplace with things like IoT, AI, and more going forward. “We’re really trying to make it easier for everyone to unlock the benefits of CPaaS.”
