An overview of the CPaaS market suggests we are still in the early days, meaning there is slow adoption among enterprise leadership, at least according to Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Service Director, Nemertes, who told me in a recent interview:
"We're seeing about six percent of our research participants currently using CPaaS, so I'd argue that the market is somewhat immature"
When the market does mature, however, what might that look like for vendors across the industry? I posed this question to Lazar, who enlightened me about the future of CPaaS, and what it might look like. I did so because I wanted to gain insight into the world of possibilities the majority of enterprises have yet to explore with CPaaS.
Maturity Means More Options for Business Comms
During our interview, Lazar shared, maturity will mean the broad availability of voice, video, and messaging APIs that enable customers to build communications into native apps. These APIs will even lead to the development of new applications using APIs - meaning enterprises will no longer have to purchase pricey platforms they will only use for one or two features.
"For example, most of the CPaaS adoption we see today is focused on messaging to enable capabilities like sending customer notifications or other texts"
"In a fully mature CPaaS market, we can expect that enterprises could build custom apps using off-the-shelf APIs and only pay for what they need," he added. This suggests, if enterprises want to build a video-enabled telemedicine app that enables messaging, remote monitoring of sensors, and voice control, they can. It might also imply they could do so without using multiple CPaaS providers - effectively eliminating the need for up-front investments on unified communications platforms.
