Communications Platforms Give CSPs Powerful Tools
Take the Internet of Things (IoT) for example. According to Gartner, there will be 20.4 billion IoT devices in use by the end of 2020. Furthermore, Business Insider forecasts that there will be over 64 billion IoT devices by 2025.
The total economic impact of IoT could range between $4 and $11 trillion per year by 2025, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, and by 2024 the global IoT healthcare market is expected to reach $140 billion with devices, sensors and applications that make it possible for medical professionals to better monitor and treat patients.
While IoT devices are clearly already having an impact on the world’s network infrastructure, that influence is only going to increase in the coming years. It is the blend of IoT and RTC applications—enabling humans and machines to interact seamlessly and securely—that is opening up new service and revenue opportunities for CSPs.
CPaaS marketplaces will flourish as developers from the IoT and RTC worlds work together to make something simple yet valuable possible. For an example, consider real-time alerts that are sent by a smart appliance or home security system to the homeowner. In a more industrial use case, large manufacturing plants or oil rigs, energy grids or public transportation systems will be instrumented so that expensive and mission-critical equipment can send alerts to precisely the right technician with the right skills in the closest location to immediately address problems of output and safety.
As a cloud-based solution, CSPs can stand up CPaaS services that are designed for the intersection of IoT and RTC, with real-time communications features including voice, video and messaging embedded into their own field service applications—without their customers needing to build back-end infrastructure and interfaces.
Perhaps the biggest opportunity of all will lie in the way CPaaS allows CSPs and enterprises to rapidly benefit from a robust, reliable and shared network, one that’s fully programmable with web interfaces and APIs that make it easy to manage connectivity and pre-built “wrappers.”
The appeal to IoT manufacturers is tremendous. CPaaS can be a secure, cloud-based platform that enables the intake, management and storage of data from multiple sources in multiple locations across multiple divisions, especially for manufacturers whose solutions are designed for interacting with human beings. Once data is stored within the CPaaS platform, the data can be integrated. Analytics can be applied either in the cloud or at the edge, and results securely accessed by privileged users or administrators from any location.
In 2020 and beyond, CPaaS can enable global, seamless connectivity across network technologies and geographical borders. This will extend to not only to the Internet of Things but also to the Internet of People and the Internet of Everything. CSPs have an opportunity in front of them, given their expertise in networking, cloud and global regulations. CPaaS offerings can include gateways, secure storage and control systems that govern data integrity, make provisioning simple and changes efficient.
The first phase of CPaaS taught us a great deal, but it is this second phase that will open up new markets for CSPs, enhancing their prospects when addressing the largest growth areas like IoT, mobility, cloud, big data analytics and more with exciting advanced offers for enterprise and business customers.
