ININ Pushes CaaS For Customer Contacts

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October 24, 2010

Why Interactive Intelligence’s CaaS offering For Contact Centers Can Be A UC Winner

By Art Rosenberg

By now, you must have read some of the very positive analyst comments on Interactive Intelligence’s (ININ) Partner and Analyst conference in San Antonio, TX on October 11-13th. What was most impressive to attendees is how well-structured ININ’s contact center software applications were to cover both traditional call center and future multi-modal UC business communication needs.

What caught my attention, however, was the successful push that ININ was making in the hosted services market, they refer to as CaaS or Communications as a Service.

ININ Offers Contact Center Implementation Flexibility

The idea is now new, but ININ has taken the lead in making CaaS offerings more flexible in order to overcome the concerns of organizations that don’t know enough (yet) about whether they want to end up with a hosted contact center service or take some or all responsibility for support internally.

Given that customer interaction applications are moving into the new UC domain of “multimodal communications,” there is little internal experience available to make such a decision yet. So, the obvious approach is to “try before buy” with minimum cost and maximum flexibility.

What ININ has cleverly come up with is a VoIP integration option to start with a hosted service, but allows subsequent switching to other support alternatives based on actual experience with the specific UC applications involved.

Not surprisingly, ININ reports tremendous interest in their CaaS offering for contact center applications, particularly since they have gone out of their way to allow business organizations to retain local control over their telephony communications activities (CaaS with Local Control). This makes their offering practical for both the SMB market, as well as for larger enterprises that have larger telephone system investments to protect.

In terms of other contact center UC application functions, those are still evolving slowly but steadily, but will benefit from ININ’s “”all in one” platform philosophy for cost efficient application integrations. ININ’s approach is being enthusiastically supported by their business partners and VARs, who are focused on helping customers tailor different business applications to support both inbound and outbound multimodal customer interactions, typically managed and supported by “CRM” applications.

I am waiting to see them support the UC needs of consumers who will be using mobile smartphones for all forms of customer interactions and information services!

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.