What a great way to kick off our CPaaSAA Panel Series! We were fortunate to have three of the top CPaaS analysts in the business, Courtney Munroe of IDC, Raul Castanon of S&P Global, and Michael Brandenburg from Frost & Sullivan join our moderator Evan Kirstel in a thoughtful discussion about the CPaaS market. They have been tracking and writing about the space for 7-8 years and so were able to give a historical overview as well as some great data points on where we are today and where we are going from here.
I had four key takeaways from the session that I found super interesting.
`1- I’ll start with where they ended, a full consensus that the best is yet to come! Their numbers vary slightly between them but we are looking at growing from roughly $15B as an industry last year to a forecast of $25B within three years. With that kind of forecasted growth, yes, the best is yet to come!
2- There was agreement that there is a key role for CSPs to play in the growth of the industry though there was a difference of opinion on how to go about that. Courtney suggested that CSPs should find a way to partner with current OTT CPaaS providers, while Raul agreed with this point he also suggested that there is a unique opportunity in the SME market that may lend itself to a different approach by partnering with one of the CPaaS enabling players. The most interesting point that came out of this part of the discussion was a piece of data that Michael shared from a recent survey, which is actually my #3 takeaway.
3- According to research by Frost & Sullivan, Michael shared that their recent survey showed that enterprises prefer to buy services from their Service Provider and so that is where they will look first for new services. CSPs without a solution available are seeing that business walk across the street. It’s critical that CSPs have a solution to keep their current customers happy.
4- The fourth takeaway was that low-code no-code tools are really important moving forward. There is a limited number of developers so it will be important for providers to be able to deliver “easy” to consume CPaaS services. To scale, two things will be important, turnkey apps and low-code no-code tools. 2FA, Number Masking, A2P, type turnkey services come to mind where there is a defined feature set and market. But also, as we look for higher adoptions inside a more traditional enterprise, they are looking at how they can embed communications into their business. Having tools that make it easy to orchestrate between platforms will be a real differentiator and help enterprises deploy CPaaS services faster without needing development resources to do it.
We look forward to Evan hosting our next event in two weeks where we have another awesome panel ready to go where he will sit down with founders of three of the original CPaaS players that helped shape the industry and kick off a multi-billion dollar industry, Jason Goecke (Tropo 2011-2015, sold to Cisco), Tony Jamous (Nexmo 2010-2018, sold to Vonage which in turn was sold to Ericsson this year) and Jean Deruelle (Telestax 2011-2021, sold to Mavenir). They will come together to look back on how all of this got started, what went well and what lessons they learned along the way that can help each of us along our own business journeys.