How to Get In on the Coming CPaaS Revolution

Communications platform as a service (CPaaS) is the hottest new trend in the channel, and we’re sure to hear more about it in 2020.

But what exactly is it, who is it right for and how do partners take advantage so they can be on the leading edge of this tech? There are a lot of questions that will be addressed at next month’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo.

During a presentation, “How to Get In Early on the CPaaS Opportunity,” on March 11, Jon Arnold of J Arnold & Associates will lead a panel of partners who will share how they’ve used CPaaS to increase customer stickiness, and help attendees lay out a plan of action for jumping on the trend.

Phone.com’s Ari Rabban

Panelists include Eric Hernaez, president of SkySwitch; Ari Rabban, CEO and co-founder of Phone.com;, and Steve Smith, CEO of Fonative.

In a Q&A, Rabban and Smith give a sneak peek of the information they plan to share with attendees.

Channel Partners: What encompasses a successful CPaaS solution and provider?

Ari Rabban: The definition of a CPaaS is very wide and I would like to break into four parts:

• Are you a company that focuses on allowing developers to build applications and services (Twilio arguably the defining company here)?
• Who are you marketing to? Developers, enterprises, small business?
• Who is doing the work? The customer or your company with the customer?
• Is your CPaaS for integrations into known third-party services (CRM, etc.) or for building new applications and solutions?

Knowing who you are serving and how it fits with your target audience is key.

Steve Smith: I think a good CPaaS solution/provider needs to excel in the following areas:

• Feature set — at a minimum they generally need to make and receive voice calls, and send and receive text messages, as well as provision underlying phone numbers.
• Agility — because CPaaS is in the cloud, a good provider can move fast, extend the feature set and extend their solution if a customer has specific requirements.
• Documentation and developer support — a good CPaaS provider will have careful and clear developer docs, and a good system for supporting developers.
• Customer support — a good CPaaS solution needs have great customer support group, and quickly respond to inquiries and issues.
• Stability — the provider must have high uptime and should be willing to enter into SLAs.
• Security — your CPaaS solution should have a solid information security program and be constantly assessing threats and best practices, and doing everything they can to keep customer’s data, calls and texts secure.
• Scalability — a good provider should have a solution that can scale to the expected needs of the application.

CP: What are the challenges of incorporating/building a CPaaS solution? How did you overcome those?

AR: We focus on small business. and as much as we would like to enable a Twilio-like set of APIs to allow developers to build their own services and applications, we are better served assisting our customers with customized solutions that fit their needs. We do have open APIs that let developers …