Avaya is not resting on its laurels after being crowned a leader in the CPaaS landscape, with new features set to arrive imminently.  

The vendor’s OneCloud CPaaS was named a Major Player in the 2021 IDC MarketScape for the worldwide CPaaS market, and praised for its tight integration with unified comms and contact centre technologies.  

Speaking to UC Today, Nick Dicksee, UK&I CPaaS Specialist Lead at Avaya, said that disruption throughout the pandemic has boosted demand for CpaaS, with businesses needing quick and flexible solutions.  

“Many organisations have turned to the cloud to gain access to the tools and capabilities that allow them to adapt and change to customer and user demands,” he said.  

“More of them are infusing AI into customer and employee journeys to provide more self-service and automation, thereby relieving pressure on other resources.   

“CPaaS is at the heart of many of those composable experiences; it integrates communications and other capabilities into business applications and processes in a rapid and agile approach – in turn allowing organisations to be agile themselves when faced with change”   

Demand for CPaaS is evident in IDC’s latest forecasts, with the market set to grow from $4.3bn in 2019 to $17.7bn in 2024 – equating to a CAGR of 33 percent.    

IDC praised Avaya for its strong channel ecosystem, built up of 2,700 partners and 200 integrations with software vendors.  

Courtney Munroe, Vice President of Worldwide Telecommunications Research at IDC, said: “The cloud has become extremely important to the communications industry, reducing barriers to entry into the communications landscape and increasing ease-of-use and scalability.  

“Built as a combination of communications platforms and cloud computing, CPaaS provides a cloud-based development platform and the necessary communications application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable software developers to easily integrate communications capabilities directly into internal and customer-facing applications and workflows.”  

Dicksee elaborated on the self-service benefits that come from Avaya’s CPaaS, saying that he expects to see businesses continue to automate their capabilities over the coming years by integrating intelligent capabilities into an existing platform   

These could include cloud-based interactive voice response (IVR), digital deflection capabilities, natural language capabilities and proactive outbound notifications.  

“Being able to add these capabilities to an existing solution without the need for additional hardware and licensing is very attractive to customers,” he added.  

Looking to the Future

Dicksee said that Avaya’s CPaaS offering is a “force multiplier” for the vendor’s UCaaS and CCaaS applications, bringing the potential to orchestrate and customise the entire customer journey.  

He explained that a number of key enhancements are on their way for the platform, all centred on solving the queries that customers bring to businesses. They will also help businesses with on-premises systems take advantage the capabilities that stem from cloud and AI innovation.  

“These innovations include additional speech and natural language options within the cloud IVR; providing agents context from interactions customers have had in the IVR; and further logic capabilities to provide specific messaging based on circumstances such as time of day and location,” Dicksee concluded.  

“These are just a few of the developments that will be seen shortly not in months but just a few weeks – the key benefits of an agile, composable platform!” 

 



from UC Today https://ift.tt/3ggwyUm