Communications as a Service (CaaS) is one of those buzzwords that lots of people talk about but that it's not always clear is really materializing in the marketplace. Interactive Intelligence is out with some proof points.The company already has a CaaS offering running out of a datacenter in its Indianapolis HQ, and in the last two quarters, CaaS accounted for more than 25% of Interactive's revenue, growing 59% year-over-year in the latest quarter, according to Joe Staples, chief marketing officer.
Interactive offers a range of capabilities and applications via CaaS, including basic call control and other UC apps, but focusing primarily on contact center apps such as ACD, call recording and IVR. Joe Staples said, "We approach CaaS from the contact center," meaning that's where they make the sale, and then if the customer needs call control as an add-on for a few employees, or something similar, Interactive is capable of folding that in.
According to Staples, most customers opt for a CaaS variation in which contact center voice traffic and call recording stay on the customer site, behind their firewall; only signaling and other data running the application traverses the MPLS network that connects the customer site to the Interactive intelligence datacenter.
The newest CaaS elements that Interactive's just announced include:
* A customer web portal providing billing summaries; billing detail; administrative changes; call monitoring; access to recordings
* Workforce management application
* Agentless dialing (i.e., "outbound IVR")
GA is slated for late 2Q/early 3Q. Pricing starts at $65 per user per month, ranging up to $200 "fully loaded with a lot of app availability," Joe Staples said.
The pay-as-you-go, offload-the-capex nature of CaaS is, in fact, what's driving the growth in Interactive's business here; the company offers the following list:
Seeing a significant shift toward CaaS driven by: --The broader trend toward the cloud --Quicker deployment --Low/no upfront costs --Reduced IT requirements
In this trend, customers are looking for: --Reliability --Security --Flexibility --Broad application portfolios --Favorable TCO
In this trend, customers are looking for: --Reliability --Security --Flexibility --Broad application portfolios --Favorable TCO
CaaS could potentially put a vendor in the awkward position of competing with its channel partners, and while Joe Staples conceded that Interactive has "probably seen some pushback," it hasn't been extensive, because Interactive's channel is dominated by smaller, regionalized VARs who might not be likely to want to build out their own infrastructure to support a CaaS offering of their own. These channel partners are able to re-sell the Interactive-hosted CaaS service if they have customers who want communications as a service.
Especially in an area like contact centers--which can have notoriously seasonal variations in demands on the infrastructure--it's not surprising that CaaS would be catching on.
