Communications platform as a service (CPaaS) has been around for a while now and has been a hot topic — off and on — for at least five years. CPaaS pioneer Twilio’s 2016 IPO was one of that year’s huge successes, and the company’s CEO, Jeff Lawson, keynoted
Enterprise Connect in 2017. But at the time, the industry didn’t seem to know what to do with CPaaS, at least to drive the kind of large-scale changes that the early excitement seemed to promise.
Five years later, CPaaS finally seems ready for its moment, carried along by wider trends in both the IT industry and the world in general.
Of course, the broad societal driver for CPaaS is the pandemic, which has supercharged enterprises’ focus on digital transformation and made rapid response to customer demands an essential quality for every organization’s customer experience (CX) strategy. As it happened, the earliest, simplest use cases for CPaaS — things like SMS-based alerts and reminders — were tailor-made for pandemic-driven scenarios like food delivery and curbside pickup.
But enterprises now have the opportunity to move beyond these simple use cases, and a new IT industry phrase is making it easier to spread the word about CPaaS’s potential: low-code/no-code.
The idea that you don’t need high-priced, potentially hard-to-find developers to add functionality to an application has obvious appeal for enterprises. It’s an especially powerful idea for CX, which has become such a critical differentiator for enterprises competing for business from a public whose demands and ways of interacting with businesses are constantly changing.
Of course, reality never turns out to be as simple as a four-word catchphrase, which means that your enterprise’s experience with CPaaS and low-code/no-code will be specific to your situation, and obviously, the more ambitious your aims, the less likely there’s an off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solution.
Still, CPaaS seems poised for a breakthrough and significant growth. On a recent Enterprise Connect and No Jitter
webinar, Robin Gareiss, CEO and principal analyst at Metrigy, presented some of her firm’s research in this area, showing that by the end of this year, more than two-thirds of enterprises surveyed expect to be using CPaaS, with strong growth seen for the future.
Robin will be
presenting her CPaaS research at
Enterprise Connect 2022 in Orlando in less than three weeks, and it’s not too late for you to make plans to join us for our first in-person event in three years. The past two years have upended most enterprises’ strategies for modernizing their communications technology and have left everyone racing to keep up as the pace of technology transformation has gone into overdrive.
Enterprise Connect is your best opportunity to squeeze a year’s worth of insights and learning into three-and-a-half information-packed days. It’s also an opportunity to reconnect with the industry and colleagues, and for managers, it’s a great tool in the ongoing struggle against the Great Resignation —enriching your team members’ careers is a great way to show you’re investing in them.
I can’t wait to see everyone in person once more, and I hope you can join us in Orlando March 21–24 for this year’s best opportunity to keep your enterprise at the top of its game when it comes to communications and collaboration technology.
