Technology for MSMEs: The communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) market will reach $29 billion globally by 2025, rising from $16 billion in 2022, with growth driven by the SME sector, said a new global study by the digital technology market research firm Juniper Research on Monday. To capitalise on this substantial growth of 80 per cent over the next three years, CPaaS vendors will have to focus on the development of managed services (outsourcing services) over their platforms to enable the creation and management of rich media content over channels such as OTT business messaging, email and social media, the study noted.
CPaaS is actually a cloud solution for developers to add communication, customer service, and automation features to business applications or softwares such as video conferencing, SMS/MMS, interactive voice response (IVR), social media channels like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, etc. A chat box on a website answering customer queries is another known CPaaS example.
“As markets become increasingly saturated with CPaaS service provision, CPaaS vendors must expand deeper into the SME sector,” the research said focusing on North America, Latin America, West Europe, Central & East Europe, Far East & China, Indian Subcontinent, Rest of Asia Pacific and Africa & Middle East.
Research’s author Sam Barker said, “CPaaS vendors now compete on the capabilities of managed services to attract SMEs. As many of these smaller enterprises lack in-house development facilities, they will choose the CPaaS platform that provides the most comprehensive managed services for rich media channels.”
Among all channels, SMS has historically been the cornerstone of CPaaS revenue globally and it will still account for over 50 per cent of all CPaaS revenue by 2025, owing to its established reliability in termination for services such as multi-factor authentication. However, rich media channels, such as email and social media will continue to expand, and account for over $10 billion of revenue by 2025, representing over 40% of CPaaS market value, the study added. As a result, platforms that fail to include managed services for rich media services in three-year plans risk missing out on the substantial growth predicted for the CPaaS market.
Also read: SMEs are now warming up to this messaging solution to digitally connect with consumers
The global mobile business messaging market is likely to jump 63 per cent from $48 billion in 2022 to $78 billion by 2027, on the back of enterprise adoption of rich communication services (RCS), with businesses harnessing the end-to-end encryption and verified sender identities RCS provides to reduce messaging fraud, a previous whitepaper by Juniper in November last year noted.
RCS is the new protocol for sending SMS with videos, audios, images, and other rich content beyond text. The total number of SMS business messages sent is likely to reach 1.7 trillion in 2023 from 1.6 trillion in 2022 led by usage in the retail sector.
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