Americas

  • United States
brandon_butler
Senior Editor

Amazon Connect brings contact centers to the cloud

News
Mar 28, 20173 mins
Amazon Web ServicesCloud ComputingCollaboration Software

Amazon is getting deeper into the enterprise communications market

business heros
Credit: Thinkstock

Amazon today released Connect, a contact center as a service offering hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud.

The move represents AWS attempting to jump into a burgeoning market for cloud-based contact center software, while continuing to push AWS into the enterprise communications market. Just last month AWS announced Chime, a cloud-based Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) offering.

+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform | This is not the sort of publicity Avaya was seeking +

Amazon Connect is a completely cloud-based contact center platform that AWS says can be set up in minutes and customized and used by line of business workers. It can accept incoming and make outgoing calls, including optional toll-free numbers. Customizable features include hours of operation, queues to route calls to specific agents, creation of prompts and analytics to monitor the system. Like other cloud-based contact center offerings, it requires no on-premises hardware and is billed on a pay-as-you-go model instead of a per-seat license, which is the typical on-premises call center software model. Amazon says it will integrate its other cloud-based services into Connect, including its S3 storage platform for recording and storing calls, and Lex, it’s natural language processing machine learning technology.

Customers pay for Connect based on the number of customer minutes it is used and the amount of time spent on the phone. Calls cost $0.03 or $0.06 for toll-free numbers in the U.S.

“It’s a natural fit for them to enter this market,” says Tom Goodmanson, CEO of Calabrio, which offers a call center optimization and analytics platform that integrates with Amazon Connect. The most attractive thing about Connect, Goodmanson says, is that Amazon, the retailer, has used this internally for years and now AWS is exposing it as a service to customers. “Amazon is a company that knows customer service and knows the web,” he adds.

AWS will have competition with incumbent on-premises and cloud-based vendors. Gartner’s Contact Center as a Service, North America Magic Quadrant showed leaders being Five9, inContact and Interactive Intelligence, with 8×8 also placing on the list. Leading on-premises contact center infrastructure vendors last year included Cisco, Genesys, Avaya and Interaction.

Cloud-based contact center solutions still represent a minority of overall contact center use cases, but its growing fast. IDC estimates that worldwide contact center application software revenues were about $5.8 billion for on premises and $1.9 billion for public-cloud in 2016; by 2020, on-premises will be $5.5 billion and cloud will be $4.3 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate of -0.8% for on-premises and 22.9% for the cloud over that time.

brandon_butler
Senior Editor

Senior Editor Brandon Butler covers the cloud computing industry for Network World by focusing on the advancements of major players in the industry, tracking end user deployments and keeping tabs on the hottest new startups. He contributes to NetworkWorld.com and is the author of the Cloud Chronicles blog. Before starting at Network World in January 2012, he worked for a daily newspaper in Massachusetts and the Worcester Business Journal, where he was a senior reporter and editor of MetroWest 495 Biz. Email him at bbutler@nww.com and follow him on Twitter @BButlerNWW.

More from this author