Why 2020 will be a year of transformation for the CPaaS industry
This year, brands will increasingly look for CPaaS solutions to bring a differentiating edge to their interface, make it more consumer-friendly, and expect to gain a larger market share.
Digital transformation has pushed technology companies to perpetually think on their feet to create unique consumer experiences. Of late, Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) has emerged as an inevitable tool to achieve this by providing a one-stop real-time communication solution to deliver an omnichannel experience.
Businesses across industries are deploying ingenious CPaaS solutions to embed real-time communication features, i.e., voice, videos, and text within their platforms without having to additionally invest in backend infrastructure and interfaces.
Let’s take a look at some of the trends that will take CPaaS industry to new heights this year.
1. Asia to drive the next wave of growth for CPaaS
Given that digital transformation originated from North America and Europe, the CPaaS market in these regions has been stronger and is much ahead on the maturity curve. In 2020, we expect Asia to catch up with the trend and witness multi-fold growth in demand for CPaaS solutions, driven by factors like pervasive connectivity and high digital transformation adoption rates in the region.
2. Richer experience with full-stack
Affordable devices and data have already empowered consumers to experience digital communications. This year, they will expect much more than vanilla experience when they engage with various brands.
Therefore, the entire focus will be on providing an omnichannel experience – allowing users to communicate on any device, browser, and most importantly, any channel i.e., voice, video, and messaging. Therefore, players who offer full-stack APIs will have a clear advantage over those who do not.
3. Telcos-CPaaS partnership to rewrite a few scripts
As consumers explore new avenues for real-time communication, say OTT platforms that provide more features and flexibility at a lower cost, their engagement with traditional telephony such as voice and SMSs services will reduce substantially. This is a disadvantageous situation for telecom companies. In order to stay relevant and turn things around, telcos will partner with CPaaS players and offer solutions on their own network leveraging their existing infrastructures and data centres, opening up new revenue streams.
4.Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be the real game-changer
CPaaS solutions will use Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Big Data, etc., to predict and measure the quality and stability of service that can bring forth any abnormal patterns of behaviour before they snowball into major anomalies. Another business process to highly benefit from AI would be capacity planning. Enterprises generally rely on empirical data from similar projects to ascertain their future resource requirements. With AI, they can analyse data patterns by region, usage, and multiple other metrics. This helps them foresee server downtimes and create alternate capacity. Ultimately, the use of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR and VR) can help businesses create highly immersive experiences. These experiences will transform several industries.
5.The ubiquitous shift from Person-to-Person to Person-to-Device
With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), communications in 2020 will evolve substantially from people communicating with each other to connected devices taking the centre-stage. While smart devices have been collecting data for long, brands have been wondering how to put this data to effective use. CPaaS will make person-to-person and person-to-device communication ‘smarter’ by bringing in a communications layer, which will help information reach the right audience without much human intervention.
To put it into a nutshell, it is quite evident that brands will increasingly look for CPaaS solutions to bring a differentiating edge to their interface, make it more consumer-friendly and expect to gain a larger market share.
Furthermore, business benefits such as low overhead costs, low risk involved, increased ROI, and insights for intelligent decision-making will make CPaaS the quintessential real-time communication tool for brands in 2020.
(Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta)
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)