Interactive Intelligence's annual Interactions conference in Indianapolis, Ind., kicked off Monday with executives sharing major successes and painting a picture of what the path forward looks like for the 20-year-old company.
Chances are you're no stranger to Interactive's cloud story, which has been unfolding over the past several years and covered regularly on No Jitter. For quite some time, Interactive has been known (and still is) in the contact center space for its on-premises Customer Interaction Center (CIC) solution, which takes a cloud/hybrid form in a CaaS offering. However, over the past several years, Interactive has been betting on the cloud in a big way with its PureCloud platform, which runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and provides the foundation for its three main solution sets: PureCloud Communicate, Pure Cloud Collaborate, and PureCloud Engage. (If you aren't quite up to speed on these solutions, you can get caught up with some of the No Jitter resources provided in the sidebar.)
As Interactive CEO Don Brown said during an analyst and press briefing Monday, the company will continue refining CIC, which remains a large part of Interactive's business, with new features and functionality. One example is Snippet Recordings, which allows things like authorizations to be recorded and stored separately. But the real focus is on PureCloud. "CIC is great," Brown said. "We're continuing to enhance it, but our future and leading platform is PureCloud. ... We're not hiding the fact that the juice for us is in PureCloud."
Comparing PureCloud and CIC functionally, CIC has more advanced management and predictive dialing capabilities, Brown said. But by the end of the year, PureCloud is slated to be more on par in these areas. Because PureCloud uses a microservices architecture, which turns features and functions into independently deployed services, it can more quickly build and incorporate new capabilities for the PureCloud solutions than for CIC. As an example, Brown said microservices for knowledge, case, and workforce management are on tap.
As Interactive continues to refine CIC and build out microservices for PureCloud, Brown clarified that the company is not trying to claim that CIC and PureCloud will eventually be equivalent. Some functionality simply doesn't make sense in both solutions. For example, co-browsing is inherently cloud since it relies on the Internet; therefore, it wouldn't make sense to build co-browsing into CIC. Instead, the approach is to build such functions into PureCloud and then use PureCloud to complement CIC.
- Interactive Intelligence Introduces PureCloud Engage, by Michelle Burbick
- Interactive Intelligence 'Thinks Different' with PureCloud Communicate, by Brian Riggs
- Why Amazon Web Services for PureCloud?, by Sheila McGee-Smith
- Interacting With Interactive CEO Don Brown, by Dave Michels
Interactive has had a particularly impressive first quarter in regard to PureCloud, with many wins announced, new partners coming forward, and new features made generally available, as its press release details.
In Q4 2015, PureCloud gained 24 new customers, so the company set a goal to double that and gain 50 new PureCloud customers in Q1 2016. But Q1 results were far above expectations, with Interactive landing 118 new PureCloud customers... and it now expects just as many wins in Q2, Brown said.
Overall, Interactive is close to 200 PureCloud customers in North America, Latin America, the U.K., Europe, the Middle East, Japan, and Australia. It and operates in four AWS regions: Virginia, Sydney, Tokyo, and Dublin. As AWS rolls out in Brazil (Sao Paulo), Canada (Montreal), Korea (Seoul), Singapore, and elsewhere in the U.S., Interactive will be there, too, Brown said.
Interactive's mission is to focus on transparency, scalability, and functionality. In regard to transparency, Interactive is "putting it all out there," providing a status site, open to everyone (including competitors) that shows both operational status as well as functionality. While scalability was hard to get going initially, Brown said, the company had a breakthrough in December 2015 and can now support more than 2 million concurrent agents on the platform (although he acknowledged that of course it hasn't needed to do so in deployment yet). In terms of functionality, Interactive has rolled out its own telco voice service and adds new features monthly including recent additions around E-911, email routing, Twitter monitoring, Web co-browsing, and WebRTC softphone. And when PureCloud gains its HIPAA certification by the end of the month, it will open the door to many healthcare companies looking to leverage the benefits of the cloud, Brown said.
As the company paves its path into 2017, it plans to continue to focus on the competitive advantages PureCloud brings by aggressively pursuing new customer acquisitions, migrating portions of its CIC installed base, selling PureCloud as a complement to CIC, and working on growing its partner programs. CIC will continue to be targeted at businesses that require a premises-based solution, and CaaS will be reserved for large private cloud customers.
Interactive is focused on proving that it is a successful cloud company. For 2017, it aims to achieve more than half of its revenues from cloud and operate profitably even while offering aggressive pricing. "We intend to maintain the highest cloud revenue growth rate in the industry," Brown said.
The company also appears to be dabbling in virtual reality (VR), and Brown said he sees lots of relevancy for VR in the contact center, enabling companies to provide virtual tours and product demos, for example. With a VR demo slated for later this week, we'll have to wait and see how fully baked the concept is and whether we can expect to see VR in an upcoming product release.
And besides VR, Interactive has one other cloud project in the works that promises to be transformative ... dangerous, even. Take a look at the product announcement video below and see for yourself:
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