Evolving Business Models Drive Industry Transformation and New Growth Opportunities in Programmable Communications

API-based solutions often represent a significant departure from how businesses have become accustomed to purchasing and deploying communications. Their value lies in providing a powerful toolset to make business communications applications richer and more tightly integrated within business workflows. For example, an organization may choose to allow its customers to communicate with employees using short messaging services (SMS) on business numbers. If the organization’s existing on-premises UC platform does not support SMS, the business can leverage a CPaaS provider to enable text messaging as an integration or overlay of existing communications tools. In this example, the business maintains the existing relationship with its voice providers and its preferred UC vendor while leveraging a CPaaS provider to address a gap in customer interaction capabilities.

Like other cloud-based services, most CPaaS solutions offer businesses a compelling operating expense (OpEx) alternative to capital expenditures (CapEx) to deploy the appropriate communications and network infrastructure needed to securely support API-driven voice, video, and messaging services. Also important, cloud-based CPaaS offerings are priced at published per-API call or per-minute rates, enabling businesses to pay for the exact amount of services they consume. This is a particularly compelling value proposition for organizations with varying levels of demand or seasonal spikes in business activity. The inherent scalability of cloud architectures also benefits CPaaS, enabling businesses to consume as much or as little of a provider’s API-directed services as needed by their application or work process.

Programmable communications solutions, particularly communications platform as a service (CPaaS) offerings, have been experiencing steady growth owing to increasing awareness among enterprise decision makers and the market’s ability to serve the needs of both traditional (i.e., independent) and enterprise developers.

The programmable communications market received a jumpstart in 2020 as requirements to support brand-new use cases, such as contact tracing and curbside pickup, pushed businesses of all sizes to rethink business processes and customer engagement.
Today, the key value proposition of CPaaS—providing a powerful toolset to make business communications applications richer and more tightly integrated within business workflows—is perfectly aligned with the ongoing digital transformation efforts being undertaken by nearly every organization.

As a result, the global CPaaS market is in a high-growth stage, with many of the contenders in the market reporting annual double-digit growth rates.

The steep growth trajectory is driven by:
• A steady stream of innovative new features and capabilities delivered by CPaaS providers
• The entry of new providers in the market
• Increased interest and adoption of API-driven communications services by customers of all sizes

This study includes data from a 2024 Frost & Sullivan IT decision-maker survey conducted to gain insights on the following end-user organizations’ priorities:
• Current communications and collaboration technology adoption rates and future adoption plans.
• Demand for communications platform as a service (CPaaS) and programmable communications functionality through flexible application
programming interfaces (APIs)
• Demand for the various communications modalities or digital channels currently available in CPaaS solutions

The survey also aimed to understand:
• Growth opportunities within the CPaaS market for the entire enterprise communications ecosystem, including telecommunication carriers, unified
communications as a service (UCaaS) providers, unified communications (UC) technology vendors, and other ecosystem partners.
• Buying preferences and obstacles to adoption
• CPaaS adoption trends by vertical industry

Authored by: Elka Popova