CPaaS Challenges Force Partners to Consider Sales Approaches
With so much to consider regarding CPaaS challenges, we sat down with partners and analysts for some sales advice.
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What’s most telling is that based on 2022 CPaaS revenue, Twilio is the CPaaS market share leader, followed by Sinch and Vonage, with programmable messaging being the most popular CPaaS revenue driver.
Voice and email are next.
And within that landscape, there is plenty of opportunity for the channel to bankroll on upselling, recurring revenue, ongoing management, deployment and any other creative ways partners have found to make cash on CPaaS offerings — despite the challenges they face.
Anant Adya, executive vice president of Infosys, told Channel Futures that choosing the right CPaaS vendor for a specific customer requirement is a challenge in and of itself.
“While all vendors in the CPaaS area have challenges and offer basic capabilities, there are other factors to consider, such as geographic routing, call analytics, regulations, easy-to-use APIs and SDKs, support, pricing and more.”
Adya remarked: “As a system integrator, it can be formidable to obtain all this information which is why several meetings with CPaaS vendor sales teams. And technical experts remain necessary to gather the information required to move onward.”
When considering the pains channel partners in the CPaaS space typically face, “CPaaS vendors usually advertise and focus on improving customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) while promoting their brands.”
Adya notes that while working on a CPaaS solution, one Infosys customer was specifically interested in how CPaaS could reduce its overall technology spend. To avoid CPaaS challenges, vendors should spend more time conveying to potential customers, he said.
Adya continued, telling Channel Futures: “Enterprises with built-in CPaaS integrations are increasingly looking to switch providers, but the lack of a standardized migration path is a major roadblock.”
He believes that CPaaS providers offering easy-to-use migration tools and integrations with other providers will gain the upper hand.
Adya offered one final piece of insight from channel partners/system integrators at Infosys. He thinks that as enterprises grow used to UCaaS and CCaaS (contact center as a service) solutions, they expect them to be in a box.
The reality is, there is no one-size-fits-all to these kinds of solutions, he added.
But “while some niche players, like Norwood, Retarus, etc., provide SMS and fax integration as an end-to-end solution, for using the likes of Twilio, Telesign and Azure Communication Services, players like AWS would need some level of integration into workflows.”
Giving more outlook into the world of reselling, Adya commented that a reseller that sells a soluton in a box can only influence one channel, while a system integrator that can use CPaaS with the CPaaS provider and weave it into business workflows has the potential to influence the entire business.
“This opens up many opportunities for system integrators to play a considerable role in weaving the right communications channels into enterprise flows, fulfilling business needs,” he said.
Blair Pleasant is president and principal analyst at COMMfusion, and she shared her two cents on the current struggles CPaaS MSPs (managed service providers) and others face.
In terms of selling CPaaS, “it’s all about use cases, as many MSPs and channel partners like to sell technology rather than the solutions and use cases … [showcasing] what these technologies can solve.”
She then played devil’s advocate, asking: “Are you selling CPaaS or an appointment notification application? Are you selling a video API or a way for a business’ customers to interact visually with your customer service agents?”
Asking these central queries is crucial when trying to understand customer pain points. Also, how to leverage CPaaS to solve business challenges with bleeding-edge applications, Pleasant shared with Channel Futures.
“It’s not like selling a cloud PBX,” Pleasant contends.
On the other hand, she asks: “Whom do you sell to?” With CPaaS primarily aimed at developers and that community, that’s an audience MSPs and other channel partners don’t always work with.
“Which is why, again, it needs to come back to use cases that the IT folks and line-of-business people will understand.”
Pleasant adds that Twilio has done what she calls “a good job of expanding its CPaaS capabilities to solve customer service and customer experience issues.”
So has Vonage, according to Pleasant, who maintains the CPaaS giant has made its video capabilities available for more applications and use cases, calling it “useful for customer service and so many other areas.”
In the end, she claims regardless of the vendors’ offerings, the channel must focus on the use cases, which means understanding customers’ pain points — to be successful in selling, deploying, managing and otherwise thriving in CPaaS with minimal challenges.
As CPaaS and its challenges, by all accounts, show no signs of slowing momentum, there remains room for improvement, along with areas that appear to be ripe for picking for eager members of the channel looking to enhance various facets of their business.
It seems to be a matter of messaging and how you bundle offerings. There is also the matter of how well the vendor does, marketing its services.
As CPaaS and its challenges, by all accounts, show no signs of slowing momentum, there remains room for improvement, along with areas that appear to be ripe for picking for eager members of the channel looking to enhance various facets of their business.
It seems to be a matter of messaging and how you bundle offerings. There is also the matter of how well the vendor does, marketing its services.
A lot is going on in a space where companies such as Twilio, Vonage, AWS with its Chime offering, Avaya, Webex, MessageBird, Microsoft and Bandwidth, to name a few — have all worked to shape the existing communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) landscape. As a result, there are CPaaS challenges aplenty.
Analysts at Gartner note that “CPaaS offers application leaders a cloud-based, multilayered middleware on which they can develop, run and distribute communications software. It is a platform built on APIs and integrated development environments that simplify the integration of communications capabilities (for example, voice, messaging, and video) into applications, services, or business processes.”
CPaaS Challenges and Opportunities
And those a la carte services have grown to be particularly favored throughout the years, with Diane Myers, principal analyst, and Beth Schultz, vice president of research and principal analyst at Metrigy, finding in a 2023 report:
CPaaS on a global scale reached some $8.3 billion in 2022, which grew by 20% when compared year-over-year. They also forecast even more market maturity: at a rate of 11% from 2022 to 2027.
That figure could reach nearly $14 billion by then, they add.
According to the same study, conducted by Metrigy, almost 40% of organizations leverage CPaaS today, with an additional 24% of organizations saying they plan to deploy components of CPaaS by the end of 2023.
We reached out to system integrators at consulting and IT services firm Infosys to get their take. We also got the input of a unified communications and collaboration (UCC) analyst to gain a deeper understanding of CPaaS challenges.
See the slideshow above for channel insiders’ takes on how to overcome sales and technical-related CPaaS challenges to become successful.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Moshe Beauford or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
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