What is Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS)?
Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) is a cloud-based delivery model which allows businesses to add real-time communication features & capabilities to their own business applications without having to develop their own communications solutions.
These communications capabilities can include voice, video, and audio and are added by using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Both organizations that wish to embed communications capabilities into their business applications and cloud service providers that want to add communications services into their applications make use of CPaaS.
CPaaS allows businesses to customize their communication stack and integrate specific channels with their pre-existing communications software.
What functions can you add to your communications stack with CPaaS?
You can use CPaaS to add functions like these to your communications stack:
- In-app text messages
- Multimedia and video messages
- Messaging over social media (like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc)
- Call routing
- Outbound calls
- Number masking
- WebRTC-based calling
- Video-enabled helpdesks
How does CPaaS work?
CPaaS offerings include REST APIs, sample code snippets, documentation, developer support, and forums, which allow your in-house developers to add communications features like voice & video calling, text messaging, etc. directly into your own applications.
CPaaS vendors also tend to provide software development kits & libraries to help you create applications on various desktop and mobile platforms.
When you use CPaaS services, you don’t need to invest resources into creating your own back-end infrastructure. CPaaS offerings are usually billed on a monthly basis with fixed rates for certain amounts of messages or time spent on calls.
Also read: Communication Model
What are the benefits of CPaaS?
The main benefits of using CPaaS are:
- Quicker time to value for applications.
- Permits multi-tenancy within separate, secure environments.
- Pay only for what you use.
- They are more scalable since they are hosted on the cloud.
- You can continue using existing business applications instead of having to build new ones.
- It gives you more control over the user experience (UX).
- You don’t need to pay for infrastructure overheads and maintenance.
- Access to technical support and self-learning resources.
What’s the difference between CPaaS versus UCaaS?
CPaaS is a set of communications APIs that allow you to pick and integrate communications features into your software, thus transforming your applications into communication tools.
UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) gives you a single ready-made environment that you can directly start using. It provides you with a platform that has a range of communication capabilities, including video calls, call recording, phone service, usage reporting, etc.
While CPaaS allows you to customize your own solution, UCaaS essentially gives you a ready-to-use platform.
