Interactive Intelligence Moves Toward CaaS for Contact Center Automation
The trend toward SaaS–Software as a Service–has been strong all year long, and has evolved to the point where we now have an acronym of particular relevance to Unified Communications. That term is CaaS–Communications as a Service–and Interactive Intelligence Inc. has been quick to embrace it. Every vendor offering CaaS has a distinct storyline, and to get the Interactive Intelligence perspective, I recently spoke with Dr. Don Brown, President and CEO.
To start things off, Don defined CaaS as a subscription-based service that is hosted by a provider like Interactive Intelligence, which focuses on contact center automation applications. Don identified three particular aspects of contact center automation that are well-suited for being CaaS-based applications. The first is IVR–either touchtone or voice-navigated–to manage call routing flows. Second is ACD and the call routing engine to drive processes such as skills-based routing. And third is quality monitoring, particularly where calls need to be recorded. As we move further along the UC continuum, Don noted that quality monitoring needs to go beyond voice and support multimedia and other modes such as IM, and I certainly agree.
The overall rationale for CaaS in the contact center is twofold; first, the business eliminates the capital expense of onsite hardware, and second, IT can focus resources elsewhere. Interactive Intelligence’s CaaS vision is for enterprises to shift away from premise-based hardware solutions to software solutions that are hosted to the fullest extent possible.
When talking about market adoption, I found it most interesting to hear how readily Interactive Intelligence’s customers have taken to the CaaS concept. There isn’t really an early adopter profile, and Don noted that most initial customers have been pretty mainstream. He explained that enterprises are already used to SaaS applications like Salesforce.com, so the leap to CaaS for contact center applications has been rather small.
To illustrate, Don cited an early use customer–New Era Tickets. New Era is a particularly good example, as they have a great deal of demand fluctuation around major events, and CaaS is simply a better way to manage contact center resources around these spikes of activity.
Initial concerns about Interactive Intelligence’s CaaS were based around voice quality and reliance on the Internet for business-grade communication, but these are effectively addressed by the company’s MPLS networks. For CaaS to be worthwhile, Don noted that Interactive Intelligence recommends an MPLS network be in place before customers go down this path. In this regard, for companies that have MPLS networks, deploying CaaS for contact center applications should really be an incremental change. Conversely, for companies needing to incur the expense of MPLS, considerations for adoption are more complex. I suspect that these enterprises would be hard pressed to make a business case for MPLS solely on the benefits of CaaS to support their contact centers.
Interactive Intelligence has a broader vision for CaaS that goes beyond hosted contact center automation. Don explained that the company strives to be at the forefront of software-based offerings that optimize a company’s investment in their contact center operations. The norm has been for enterprises to piece together contact center solutions from multiple vendors that are mostly hardware-based. Aside from being costly, these solutions are complex and difficult to manage, especially when proprietary elements are involved. Interactive Intelligence has moved away from that model to a software-based model that is built on off-the-shelf servers and standards-based technologies.
The company’s recently-launched SIP Station is a prime example of this. In form, SIP Station may be a piece of hardware, but in function, it is very much software based. In contrast to more costly and complex IP phones, SIP Station is very affordable, simple and easy to use. In fact, SIP Station does not even have a dial pad–it is simply an appliance to enable a high-quality voice session that is managed almost entirely by software and a hosted application. This being such a new concept, I would expect that initial take-up would be from early adopter-type businesses, especially those who are already very Web-centric. The dial pad is still a deeply ingrained feature, and these habits do not change en masse overnight.
In defining Interactive Intelligence’s CaaS value proposition, I asked Don about three elements that came to mind for me: cost savings, improved network management, and productivity gains for agents. Interestingly, none of these, per se, were core value drivers. He explained that customers don’t move to their CaaS offerings for hard cost savings. No doubt, premise-based equipment requires a capital outlay, but Interactive Intelligence’s customers already have that in place and CaaS will not replace that outright.
Instead, enterprises are benefiting from the financial flexibility that CaaS provides. As enterprises expand their contact center operations, CaaS is an easier way to grow, since it’s based on a pay-as-you-go model and does not require complex budget approvals that come with capital outlays. This makes it easy to scale expenditures that are in balance with demand–not too much or too little. With Interactive Intelligence managing the service, IT has less to worry about, and the enterprise has more cost certainty.
Don believes one reason why Interactive’s CaaS solution has had early success is the fact that Interactive Intelligence provides the only hosted offering where all of the customer’s sensitive data stays on the customer’s network. Interactive Intelligence’s equipment sits on-premise either in the form of a media server and SIP proxy or a media gateway. All the voice traffic remains on the customer’s network–it does not go off-net to Interactive’s data center.
CaaS is still in its early days, and Interactive Intelligence is positioning itself to be out front and stay out front with its focus on contact center automation. It may take some time to validate the true value of CaaS, as many enterprises are still driven by metrics such as ROI and TCO, and these really don’t tell the Interactive Intelligence story very well. Hosted and cloud-based services are built around the on-demand concept, much the way utilities provide energy to our homes. This is a different way of defining value than the conventional model, which is based on a hard asset with a fixed lifespan against which a return is measured. The CaaS model is not tied to a hard asset, but clearly provides tangible value, and cannot be fairly assessed by the same metrics used for communications hardware such as IP PBXs, routers or media gateways.
After talking with Don, I came away with a better understanding not just of why contact centers would adopt CaaS, but also of the underlying value proposition. My intention is for you to come to the same conclusion–not just here, but from the broader analysis UCStrategies is providing on this topic.