How Open API Innovation can fast-track CPaaS Revolution?

As global telecom operators are gearing up to deliver higher customer-experience and assimilate innovation for their service-offerings in the 5G era, adoption of an Open API-based CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) strategy can ensure quick realization of their goals with enduring benefits. Hence, platform developers and cloud service-providers are ready to go CPaaS way.

Vaibhav Mehta, Founder and Director, Nabstract, a global enabler of Network API Platform for telcos, public cloud providers and CPaaS companies, speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the current trends in CPaaS segment and how Nabstract is driving innovation for telcos, public cloud providers and CPaaS players.

How do you look at the CPaaS space today? How can Open API enable innovation in this space?

Driven by open APIs, emerging CPaaS landscape is reimagining ways for telcos to serve their customers today. From streamlining operations to improving employee and customer-experience, offering innovative functionalities and to optimizing the costs, the impact of CPaaS as an aggregating platform is going to happen in more ways than one, catalysing growth for telecom business-operations.

In the wake of the global economy going through a digital reinvention today in almost every part of the world, telecom operators are looking for a new big thing and stretching the boundaries of innovation. Consequently, network-growth in view of accelerating digital innovation is happening at an unprecedented pace and communication channels are accordingly growing more diverse and complex than ever. To ensure better management of complexities, capitalize on the wide range of options and drive growth, CPaaS players need to tap into the world of Open APIs. Thus, they can enhance their service-offerings and optimize field-operations for telcos.

As enterprise-segment looks forward to deploying CPaaS, what is the role that Cloud Service Providers can play here?

Cloud Service-providers and Platform Developers must play the role of technology-enablers for Open API innovations, empowering telecom operators to deliver superior customer-experiences to their customers and scale the experience to their large user-bases. Due to possibilities of easy interactions with telcos, a lot of global businesses and large enterprises are embracing CPaaS solutions to meet rising customer-demands.

How are CPaaS solutions transforming engagement between enterprises and their customers?

CPaaS solutions have already taken the possibility of communication between enterprises and their customers to a new level, by introducing new and innovative ways of communication channels such as OTT messaging and voice, which can be driven into applications by developers.

CPaaS plan brings in more impactful arrangement of processes across the channel-mix for telcos and makes engagement more meaningful for their customers, ensuring deep customer-loyalty for them.

In today’s digital era, enterprise-customers are increasingly keen to get capabilities like enablement of embedded conversational interfaces, real-time 24×7 engagement and quicker and actual reactions to situations. With the right CPaaS solutions, telcos can deliver innovative features through their platforms and serve enterprises with those services efficiently.

CPaaS capabilities are gaining momentum across a number of sectors today. Generative AI-capabilities will be transforming customer-engagement possibilities for enterprises. AI as a powerful tool gives telcos a big competitive advantage with business-flexibility and the agility to adapt to constantly shifting digital trends in the markets. Subsequently, telcos can target enterprise-customers in a more impactful way today,

As telecom operators look for better monetization capabilities, how can Open APIs help in this direction?

With Open APIs, there is a growing opportunity for mobile networks today. Rapid integration of network and service-data into applications helps them to serve almost all the key vertical industries and target enterprise-segment with innovative offerings. With these innovative offerings, telecom operators are all set to come up with better monetization models.

Whether for simple applications like user-authentication or complex use-cases in tele-health, e-education and mobile money, Open APIs have emerged as public interfaces for developers to access relevant network-data and enable interoperable software, in delivering enhanced customer-experience.

Thus far, telecom operators have been more or less using networks as a static resource, by provisioning slicing or offering mobile subscriptions with better quality. But the time has come when they ought to go beyond vanilla bundling quickly and go for monetization of the real-time and dynamic behaviour of networks. Open APIs hold the key to deliver innovation. Telcos can open up their network-infrastructure to application developers, platform developers and cloud operators. Their Application Partners can consume and enhance emerging applications with CAMARA-based Network APIs and unleash new possibilities in segments like manufacturing, gaming, finance, entertainment, transport, healthcare etc.

What are some of the big advantages that Nabstract is bringing in this space today?

Nabstract brings in a vendor-agnostic API Monetization Platform, based on device, network & services, which converts complex network APIs into simple intent-based service APIs for Enterprises & Vertical Platform Developers. As an enabler for 5G B2B2X value-chain, Nabstract is engaged in the development of network exposure capabilities of 5G & Edge Cloud platform to build new differentiated services. Working with a B-2-B focus, the platform enables Telcos to get a leading edge by selling 5G-connectivity and cross-industry digital products to enterprises, realizing faster monetization from the networks.

Reducing the complexity of the network infrastructure, the platform’s simple APIs streamline and accelerate application development, quickening deployment and ROI-timelines for Telcos. With Nabstract APIs, they can integrate all the data-sources, both on-premises and on the cloud, facilitating enterprises to build, manage and scale applications across distributed environments.