During its annual partner and customer conference in Indianapolis in June 2015, Interactive Intelligence announced a new cloud contact centre platform, PureCloud Engage.
This new offering is a re-architected, multi-tenant solution that Interactive Intelligence will sell alongside its existing premise-based Customer Interaction Centre and single-tenant Communications as a Service contact centre solutions, starting in July 2015.
“Although the vendor has been offering hosted and hybrid cloud contact centre deployment options for a number of years,” observes Aphrodite Brinsmead, research analyst, Ovum, “having a multi-tenant solution will help it to compete against the established cloud-only vendors, as well as gain new small-to-mid-sized customers.”
In the eyes of Brinsmead, Interactive Intelligence has an opportunity to grow market share and innovate with PureCloud Engage.
“PureCloud Engage leverages Amazon Web Services and is aimed at customers looking for fast contact centre deployments,” she explains.
“Interactive Intelligence will initially target businesses with up to 100 agent seats that are looking for an all-in-one platform with minimal customisation requirements.”
As explained by Brinsmead, the initial release includes speech-enabled IVR, inbound and outbound dialing, call recording and quality monitoring, scripting and reporting, and CRM integrations.
Buyers also get access to its new hosted unified communications and collaboration tools PureCloud Collaborate and PureCloud Communicate, which were released in March 2015.
The initial pricing for Engage is set at US$99 per named user per month, with monthly billing commitments, making it very competitive compared with similar offerings in the market.
“Convincing customers to take on an entirely new product could be a challenge for Interactive Intelligence, especially when there are so many vendors vying for market share in North America and its big cloud competitors, inContact and Five9, have been offering their multi-tenant cloud solutions for at least 10 years,” Brinsmead adds.
“Interactive Intelligence needs to create a clear sales strategy to gain traction in the small-to-mid-size contact centre space.
“It will need to train its many partners on this new offering as well as find new resellers that can help it target smaller organisations.”
However, Brinsmead believes the cloud contact centre market is set for continued growth over at least the next five years and Interactive Intelligence is likely to be able to find customers that are willing to take a bet on this new service.
“Although Interactive Intelligence is coming late to the multi-tenant world, its PureCloud suite is built on the company’s 20 years of contact centre knowledge, along with significant R&D investment, and its cloud competitors are likely to feel threatened by this move,” Brinsmead adds.
“It has also made clear that it will continue to support all deployment models, ensuring that existing contact centre customers can choose the option that best fits their needs, whether that is cloud, hybrid, or on-premise.”
