Avaya: How CPaaS is Enabling the Future of Work 

Nick Dicksee, UK&I CPaaS Specialist Lead at Avaya, on the benefits of a modular CPaaS solution in the face of COVID-19 

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Avaya: How CPaaS is Enabling the Future of Work 
Contact CentreInsights

Published: July 29, 2021

William Smith

Communications platform as a service (CPaaS), a solution for integrating communications into business applications via APIs, has become increasingly popular thanks to the utility of a cloud-based delivery model. 

Cloud communications and workstream collaboration provider Avaya’s CPaaS offering comes as part of the wider Avaya OneCloud AI-powered experience platform, which also includes CCaaS and UCaaS components. Avaya OneCloud CPaaS enables precisely the new forms of communication that have become so necessary in the face of changing work practices caused by the pandemic. 

In an exclusive interview, CX Today welcomes Nick Dicksee, UK&I CPaaS Specialist Lead at Avaya, to walk us through the benefits of CPaaS. 

“For Avaya, CPaaS is what we’re calling a force multiplier,” explains Dicksee. “We’re using it to leverage the API economy, to then add bespoke custom applications outside of CCaaS and UCaaS – as well as the integration capabilities it offers. It is a composable platform, enabling virtually limitless innovation and customization for users, rather than trying to adopt a one-size-fits-all application.” 

The API Economy 

The offering fits within Avaya’s wider ambition to meet the demands of the API economy and the associated popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) as businesses have rapidly evolved during the pandemic. “The approach that we’ve taken with CPaaS has been based around understanding the business challenges that our customers face, especially given the challenges of the pandemic and the need to adapt to new work models,” says Dicksee.  “Avaya OneCloud CPaaS provides customers with exceptional agility and flexibility to optimize their communications and collaboration platform to deliver the best experiences for their own customers and their workforce. Additionally, Avaya OneCloud CPaaS is not limited to APIs and integration with only Avaya solutions – it’s completely platform-agnostic, so users can benefit from best-in-class innovation to meet their unique needs.” 

Part of the appeal for users is also the scalability of Avaya’s CPaaS solution. While cloud transformation has certainly been accelerated by COVID-19, it remains a potentially intimidating undertaking. “Certainly, some I’ve spoken with tell me that moving their contact centres or telephony platforms over to the cloud can be a complex undertaking. For a lot of organisations, that’s a big project with many aspects to it. CPaaS allows them to not only look at new ways of innovating and adding self-service and automation capabilities into their existing legacy solution, but it also gives them a steppingstone approach towards broader cloud adoption.” 

Composability and the Freedom to Choose 

The composability of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, and the option to choose the elements that work best for an individual business, is a key part of Avaya’s offering.  “Many organisations have voice-only contact centres,” says Dicksee. “The capability to then infuse AI into that is hugely appealing, but it’s something that historically has been very expensive, or even impossible. With Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, they don’t need to be experts in that AI capability – we can do that for them.”  

Avaya is well placed to aid in those kinds of transitions thanks to its more than 20-year history in employee and customer experience. Having witnessed many such transformations, Dicksee emphasises that Avaya stands with customers as a trusted advisor in the CPaaS space. “We ask: ‘What are the business outcomes you’re looking to achieve?’ We really try to ensure we understand user needs by taking a service design approach.  Once we know that, the composability of the solution can be leveraged to build something that truly works for you.” 

It’s clear that the popularity of CPaaS isn’t going to recede once the pandemic passes, having opened the eyes of customers to the demonstrable utility of being able to get, and pay for, just what you need. “The benefit of composability is ultimately about the fact that it’s largely a consumption-based approach,” says Dicksee. “That makes it very attractive for lots of organisations because they’re paying only for what they use. You have to think about when considering planning huge budgets – which is very important when looking at the challenges customers are currently facing.” 

Go here to find out more about Avaya OneCloud CPaaS – recently named a “Major Player” in the 2021 IDC MarketScape for the worldwide CPaaS market. 

 

Avaya was recently awarded Best CPaaS Product at UC Awards 2021. Watch the Awards here.

 

 

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