CPaaS is dead, Long live CPaaS, Filipe Leitão, EMEA Solutions Engineer, 8X8.
In this presentation Filipe covers:
- Brief history of CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) since VAS (Value Add Service) times.
- It’s not about winning the developer anymore. Or viewed another way, how everyone tries to be what Twilio was 5 years ago.
- Be where your customers are: CCaaS, UCaaS and CPaaS are becoming one. It’s all just programmable communications.
I’ve known Filipe since his time at Telestax. His presentation is a nice review of the evolution of CPaaS. From telcos initial attempts, which struggled because of the innovator’s dilemma, but they also did not understanding how to give developers what they needed. We have an excellent invited keynote from Steven Goodwin on that topic.
Twilio spent the dev marketing $$ and gained amazing web developer awareness. And those developers are important to web-centric companies decision making. They were the early adopters of Twilio’s APIs. Even in Fortune 500 companies I’ve talked about Medtronic asking its developers whether that preferred Twilio or Vonage, they went for Twilio.
As you move into mid-market and SMB, the decisions are less influenced by developers. Rather technology channel becomes more important, that is VARs, SIs, MSPs, local technology providers. 8X8 has extensive existing relationships with these channels. Twilio is building these channels, but it takes time and the culture is quite different to web-centric companies.
Filipe provides a good summary of the acquisitions 8X8 made with jitsi, callstats.io and Wavecell to deliver a complete programmable communications offer across voice, video, messaging and the associated analytics. Analytics will become more important through this decade, but that’s another story.
The last take away is the most important in ‘be where your customers are.’ It’s about solving business problems for enterprises using programmable communications. An automated reminder alert from a school to parents in the morning to complete the COVID-19 health check before they head out to school . A video collab service between a field worker and technical support to work out why the recommended fix isn’t working to avoid a repeat visit.
Slideshare is having difficulties today, here’s a direct link to Filipe’s slides.
Thank you Filipe for a great presentation. What are some of the important things to do when helping technology channels (VARs, SIs, MSPs, local technology providers) use your technologies?
Thanks Alan! First of all, speak their language. The main reason why so many of the well established CPaaS providers (and you named a few) fail on this, is because they are so obsessed with self-service and organic growth, that are not capable of scaling down to the level of the SMB & mid-market. Know their language and be structured and flexible enough to adapt to their needs and technical awareness. Channels know their customers’ language better than anyone. Adapt, treat them well and they will treat you well back. At this level is more about flexibility (at all levels – tech, billing, etc) – than technology capability.