What is CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service)?

Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) is a cloud-based delivery model that allows companies to embed extra communication features into existing business applications. It does this by providing communication APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), through which companies can deploy capabilities like voice, video, and SMS in those apps.

RingCentral—one of the leading Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) providers—also offers a comprehensive CPaaS solution through our Developers platform .

Get access to free communications APIs and embedded communications technology, and easily add voice, SMS, meetings, data, and more to your business apps.

From softphone dialers for instant calls and texts to data analytics for better insight into your workflows, the possibilities are virtually endless.

Users of RingEX, RingCentral’s comprehensive unified communications platform, get access to our APIs in their production environments as part and parcel of their plans.

That means you get a complete out-of-the-box employee experience solution with APIs for voice, SMS, social messaging, team messaging, video, fax, data, configuration, AI, and more. All starting from just $20 per user, per month.

Or, you can get a watermarked sandbox as a separate development environment to build and test business applications without accessing, impacting, or modifying production data. That’s available at just $10 per month for two included phone extensions, and a further $5 per month for each additional extension.

If you want better communication features but you don’t want to part ways with your existing business applications, then a CPaaS solution may suit you.

Business apps are the lifeblood of modern companies, whose operations revolve around sales software, CRMs, and other collaboration platforms. RingCentral offers a range of communications APIs for integration into your custom business solutions.

For companies who want to stay competitive and keep up with tech advancements that are usually reserved for big organizations, CPaaS is heaven-sent.

It’s a faster, more affordable alternative to overhauling your business apps to enable communications features. That makes it perfect for startups and mid-sized businesses who’d think twice about developing their own custom applications.

For example, most businesses run software suites from Google and Microsoft, like Gmail and Office 365. RingCentral has existing integrations that add some of the latest communication features to these commonly-used business apps.

Communications integrations available with RingCentral include:

• Click-to-dial functions for phone numbers appearing in documents, emails, or even web pages.
• A dialer that allows you to call or text from Salesforce or your other favorite CRM.
• Options to schedule, host, or join an online meeting directly from your Google Calendar or Office 365 calendar, so you don’t have to navigate away from the work you’re doing.

Check out our App Gallery to discover how to integrate these features into the productivity apps you’re already using for your business, without exerting too much effort in programming or development.

Do you have custom business applications that you use for your organization? Our communications APIs can help you add features to it.

But CPaaS technology is more than just a way to add new functions to your applications—it’s also a way to streamline your workflows. You can improve the transition from a business app to a communication function, making it much simpler and easier.

Revolutionize the way your business communicates. We provide businesses with an AI-powered communications platform , as well as pre-built APIs for voice, SMS, team messaging, online meetings, and fax.

• Voice APIs – Add advanced voice capabilities like WebRTC, answering rules, call flip, call park, call recordings, and more.
• SMS APIs – Add support for SMS, MMS, and group SMS/MMS with delivery/read status notifications.
• Fax APIs – Send online faxes directly from your business applications and add delivery/read notifications.
• Online Meetings APIs – Manage your online meetings with key business tools to bring your employees and customers together.
• Team Messaging APIs – Build rich chatbots with real-time notifications into your business applications.
• Data APIs – Gain more insight by adding access to different data like call logs and call recordings.

Our CPaaS software APIs are:

• Fast – Integrate them on your web application in 15 minutes. Leverage the professional UX and QA used in RingCentral’s own apps.
• Extensible – You can extend the user experience of RingCentral’s own integration by coming up with your own custom version.
• Customizable – Personalize user experience by adding your own touches. Update the user interface with your own colors and fonts through CSS.

RingCentral Embeddable lets you instantly add voice and text functions into your web applications through an embedded full-featured softphone. Get an integrated experience that increases productivity and efficiency without the long development time.

RingCentral is more than just a CPaaS vendor—we equip businesses with an industry-leading unified communications solution.

We are one of the few CPaaS providers that offers your business the best of both worlds. You’ll get a complete phone system with all the bells and whistles, plus a platform where you can add voice, text, fax, meetings, and data into your own business solutions.

Communications Platform as a Service, just like UCaaS, is a cloud-based service delivery model suited for any size and type of business. Unlike UCaaS, which unifies all your business communications in one platform, CPaaS adds various features like voice, video calling, and messaging to existing business applications.

The idea is to improve or enrich your communication channels, leading to greater efficiency for employees and better communication with customers. No wonder the CPaaS market, worth $16.34 billion in 2024, is expected to reach $61.59 billion by 2029.

But if you’re still not convinced, check out the following key benefits of CPaaS:

The main advantage of CPaaS is the cost savings it brings. In the past, you’d have had to build your own infrastructure to host different communications features, but CPaaS makes it easy with pre-built APIs.

Plus, CPaaS lets you select communication channels to integrate into your existing apps, instead of buying a one-size-fits-all solution with features you don’t actually need. That’s on top of the savings you get from cloud-based delivery and a pay-as-you-go subscription model.

With our CPaaS, you can integrate different features into your own business applications at no additional cost—as long as you already have a RingEX subscription.

Another of the most useful use cases for CPaaS is to streamline workflows in contact centers. Elevate how your agents interact with customers by integrating new communications features. For example, you can add a WebRTC feature so agents can take phone calls through their browser—saving them from switching to a different app.

A call recording feature will help you to coach call center agents and ensure compliance. Add analytics into team workflows to get insights into how they talk to customers, so you can identify areas of improvement and make informed decisions.

CPaaS is fully scalable, so you can easily add or remove features as needed. Expecting an influx of customer inquiries after a product launch? Add a messaging channel to reduce call queues and take the pressure off agents.

When you add communications features into your CRM, your agents no longer have to exit the app to make or receive phone calls from customers. This will help you improve efficiency while personalizing customer interactions. Also, by adding voice, SMS, and even online meetings into your CRM, customers have the option to contact you through their preferred channel.

CPaaS makes it easy to customize your tech stack to suit the needs of your unique customer base, and adapt to meet their changing preferences. All of this should help you improve customer experience in the long run.

These are just some of the benefits you can get from a CPaaS vendor. Remember that this technological advancement is driven by the need to make operations simpler, easier, and just plain better for businesses—especially those focused on customer and sales interactions.

If you want a seamless integrated system for your processes so you can focus on what’s important to you, our cloud-based CPaaS platform is one of the best ways to achieve it.

RingCentral is better known as one of the leaders in UCaaS; however, we’re also one of the top CPaaS providers. Our solution is designed to help organizations vastly improve business apps like sales software and CRM, through the addition of useful features such as notifications, multi-factor authentication, and a click-to-call option.

Organizations that combine UCaaS and CPaaS can get the best of both worlds with a top-notch business phone system that integrates communications and collaboration tools into existing apps, making the service truly customized for daily use.