A Brief Evolution of CPaaS: Past & Present

Remember when Application-to-Person (A2P) SMS was the bleeding edge of mobile customer engagement? Those days are long gone. It’s now just “table stakes” for any mobile customer experience.

The second wave of innovation for mobile customer engagement, however, comes with Communications Platform as a Service, or CPaaS, which today, offers our customers the ability to enrich the mobile customer experience for their own key stakeholders.

While A2P SMS globally has slowed to a 6% annual growth rate, the CPaaS market continues to grow at 40% annually. At Syniverse, we now see a new battlefront forming in the mobile engagement revolution—one in which, we feel, that we are uniquely positioned to win.

Syniverse Receives High Praise from Gartner

In Gartner’s most recent CPaaS Market Guide, Syniverse ranked among industry leaders within the “co-creation” model — a CPaaS approach defined by outside guidance from vendors in the absence of a company’s own developers. In our case, that means we team up with customer development teams, often global accounts, to leverage CPaaS for improving competitiveness and the customer experience.

While much of our legacy offering is rooted in A2P SMS, Gartner specifically noted our support of major messaging apps as well, and our ability to build APIs with the end-goal of integrating into popular enterprise cloud applications, including Salesforce, Workday, and Mailchimp, among others.

As the industry moves forward and our customers seek to offer the next evolution of RCS, Syniverse’s CPaaS solution will undoubtedly help them get there.

CPaaS Emerges as a Unique Opportunity for Carriers

As consumers’ purchasing habits continue to change, and Over The Top (OTT) players have applied competitive pressures on the marketplace, many carriers across the globe are at an impasse. While OTT applications undoubtedly provide some advantages to carriers, they may not be significant enough to offset other potential threats to messaging offerings through carriers’ own native core network service.

Carriers, though, can hedge these risks by considering a few approaches:

• Launch a proprietary API marketplace
• Expand communications capabilities to differentiate offerings
• Offer managed services through proprietary OTT offerings
• Partner with a CPaaS leader, such as Syniverse, on a revenue-share model that lowers carriers’ capital expenditures to deliver new services

The benefits, in fact, are multi-faceted:

• Creates new revenue streams
• Increases market share
• Monetizes existing technologies in new ways
• Protects its own core assets
• Improves customer experience and mobile subscriber retention
• Provides ability to offer carrier-grade, feature-rich communications and added value for customers made possible by its existing infrastructures

Connect With a CPaaS Industry Leader Today

CPaaS is becoming a major driver in carriers’ efforts to develop and pursue a more mature digital transformation strategy. The customer experience aspect of that digital transformation has evolved from a necessary evil to a strategic imperative in today’s “experience-first” economy.

With the advances of an omnichannel approach through which disparate channels work in unison to ultimately offer a consistent experience, prioritize the right channels within the right context, and personalize the end-users’ preferences, it’s clear that messaging has come a long way since its emergence via one-way alerts.

These days, CPaaS proves that true customer conversations are possible—with Syniverse and its partners leading that charge in today’s marketplace.