How has COVID-19 driven CPaaS API adoption?

The adoption of communications platform as a service, or CPaaS, APIs due to COVID-19 has been generally positive with demand for existing use cases and new ones. However, some verticals experienced decline in demand for APIs. Thus, CPaaS vendors saw either growth or decline in revenue depending on the customers and use cases they serve.

The pandemic brought with it changes across all industries. Some, such as travel and leisure, experienced a huge decline in their business, while others, such as healthcare and remote education, grew considerably. As a result, the communication requirements of organizations changed.

Contact centers, for example, had to quickly adapt to remote work by enabling agents to work from home instead of the office. This shift often also required a quick digital transformation to take place, migrating from on-premises contact centers to cloud-based ones. These cloud-based contact centers are traditionally developed on top of CPaaS APIs, contributing to the rapid growth of CPaaS adoption -- much faster than before the pandemic.

In the same manner, verticals like remote education, telehealth and order fulfillment all increased their demand for communications services to address doctors working while quarantined, remote patient consultations, students learning from home and consumers shopping online instead of going to shopping malls and local restaurants. All this growth translated into increased use of communication services -- messaging, voice and video calling -- which, in turn, led to an increase in CPaaS API use.

The CPaaS industry has also seen emerging use cases as a result of the pandemic. Health organizations and governments now use messaging and voice bots to communicate with the people to evaluate health symptoms and support contact tracing efforts. Large industry conferences and trade shows have shifted to virtual events, leading to growth in the consumption of video communications.

COVID-19 has accelerated the demand for digital communication services and, with it, the adoption and use of CPaaS APIs.