Many organizations add fault tolerance to their IaaS and PaaS platforms by using multiple providers. We’re seeing the same trend in SaaS software, and particularly with communications platforms as a service (CPaaS) — and for excellent reasons.
In a report based on the 451 Research Voice of the Enterprise (VOTE) survey, 451 Senior Analyst Raul Castanon says, “As mainstream enterprise adoption continues to grow, we expect CPaaS will mirror key trends driving the evolution of the larger IaaS/PaaS market.” Castanon and Plivo CEO Venky Balasubramanian covered the issues in a joint webinar.
Castanon also said, “Plivo can be considered among the pioneers for CPaaS and continues to innovate, with novel approaches such as multicloud CPaaS, which can be instrumental for enterprises looking to address challenges related to resiliency, scalability, global coverage, and regional regulation requirements.”
Three of the most important reasons for a multicloud approach include gaining 100% uptime, getting access to unique platform-specific features, and optimizing costs.
Resiliency
100% uptime is everybody’s goal, but every platform experiences outages, both unplanned and planned. When a cloud communications platform is unavailable, end users can fail to receive important information such as account alerts, delivery notifications, appointment reminders, and — worst of all — two-factor authentication messages. If someone doesn’t receive a text message with a one-time password for 2FA, they won’t be able to access the resources they need on their systems.
Using multiple cloud communications platforms keeps your team from having to depend on a single point of failure. Redundancy is a must for mission-critical systems and applications.
Plivo promises 99.99% uptime. In practice we generally do better than that — check our status page for proof. That enables us to deliver more than a billion transactions every month. If you have both a primary and a secondary CPaaS provider with those kinds of numbers, chances are you’ll never lose touch with your customers.
Platform-specific features
All CPaaS have different geographic coverage. While Plivo can deliver text messages and voice calls to more than 190 countries, some of our competitors have smaller lists; Bandwidth, for example, boasts that they have a presence in 60+ markets, while Telnyx claims 142. With multiple providers you can reach people around the globe, so if you’re in need of a Bandwidth alternative or a Telnyx alternative, we can help.
Similarly, voice quality and message deliverability vary on different platforms. If you find you’re having problems in those areas, as Plivo customer Fluent did with another CPaaS provider’s network, you can bring on a platform that can help you improve those numbers. Selecting a secondary platform allows you to send messages or calls through the provider that provides the best call quality or message deliverability, ultimately offering better service to your customers.
Cost optimization
Providers have different rates for services in different countries. With multiple providers you can plot out the best rates and optimize your costs.
But you can’t look at just the unit cost per message or per call when you consider optimization. What really matters is the total cost of ownership — or rather total cost of the service. That means considering, in addition to unit costs, items like support costs, platform costs, and people costs — the time spent using and managing the service.
With an API platform, people time includes developer time. Having an API that resembles that of a platform they’re familiar with makes adding the new platform easier and faster. Plivo’s API, for instance, are designed to be familiar to developers who’ve worked with Twilio. We also provide comprehensive documentation with code examples for seven common web development languages.
The proof is in the pudding
We joined Fluent’s Sharita Passariello in a webinar in which she talked about how taking a multicloud approach helped her organization boost revenue. Watch it and consider whether the same approach could help your business.
