A little while ago I wrote an article titled How Cloudy is Your CCM?, where I cautioned that not all “cloud” deployments of customer communication management (CCM) software are the same. Some CCM vendors define that term very loosely.
What sparked my memory about that article was something I noticed recently while filling out a request for information from Aspire CCS. They are analyst firm behind the Leaderboard, a new take on the “leader” quadrant of similar rankings and representations of CCM vendor capabilities.
Aspire was the first firm to really try to drill down and pull apart the various components of “cloud”. It’s not for me to go into the details of their intellectual property, so I won’t. Suffice it to say that they asked some very pointed questions about cloud capabilities, going into not only the “where” of deployment (i.e., on-premise versus hybrid versus private versus public cloud) but also the “how” of the product architecture (i.e., microservices and containerization), among other things.
The most interesting part (especially for me) was that they thought to ask whether a CCM vendor’s product was partly or entirely SaaS. I’m going to be very interested to see which CCM vendors admit what their customers already know, in terms of how cloudy their solutions really are.
I’m also hoping that Aspire (psst...hey, Kaspar, if you’re reading this…) makes the distinction between cloud-native solutions and cloud-hosted solutions. If you line up the architecture, containerization, deployment, and SaaS section answers, it should be very clear which solutions were truly developed on and for the cloud as opposed to being packaged up and put there. I’d even throw in multi-tenancy for good measure since any product that is incapable of supporting multiple separate “clients” concurrently probably isn’t really cloud-native.
Cloud-native solutions enable entirely new ways of architecting line-of-business software.
Why Should You Care?
Well, if you’re trying to escape legacy on-premise solutions and are looking forward and not backward, then you really want a cloud-native solution. If you want to be able to effortlessly cross-cloud platforms (e.g., AWS-to-Azure, etc.) and integrate cloud-to-cloud using APIs, then you really do want a cloud-native solution. If you’re trying to develop progressive web applications and want to use micro-frontends yourself, then you really do want a CCM solution that does as well.
You may very well think, “Oh, but I’m a small or even medium-sized business; surely I don’t care about that,” you say. Well, you may have another think coming, so to speak.
Let’s take for example a relatively small (around 300 employees) but mighty health insurer who would beg to differ with that ‘size’ assumption. This client is developing applications on Azure while our INTOUCH® product sits on AWS, while three of their applications will be leveraging INTOUCH via integrations. Employees seamlessly move back and forth between their primary business application and INTOUCH, completely unaware of where any of the software lives and not caring how it was built: they simply understand that cloud nativity is exactly what enables a small company to do great things.
It’s not just workloads or applications that are moving to the cloud. It’s development itself. Choosing cloud-native solutions (and the vendors offering them) means you’re looking beyond what gets deployed to explore and imagine what IS possible to develop (or to co-develop).
So, if you want to compete going forward, to maximize operational efficiency while also delivering a great employee experience, and to leap ahead of your legacy infrastructure and business processes, go get a cloud-native CCM solution. If you’d like to see one in action and discuss how Topdown can co-innovate with you, request a free consultation and demo today.
Image by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash
