UCaaS, CCaaS, IaaS: Amazon's Many Roles in the UC MarketUCaaS, CCaaS, IaaS: Amazon's Many Roles in the UC Market

Amazon is poised to play an important -- perhaps even a fundamental -- role in the UC market. But perhaps not in the way you expect.

Amazon Web Services has made several very interesting moves into -- or at least toward -- the UC space. Chime, introduced earlier this year and based on technology stemming from its 2016 acquisition of Biba Systems, marked Amazon's debut in the market for business communications services. Meanwhile, Connect, also introduced this year, delivers a cloud-based contact center service.

Both are targeted at businesses. Both tap into the growing popularity of simple, straightforward cloud-based communications and customer support services. But I fear neither is likely to have a noticeable impact -- certainly not in the near term but perhaps not even down the road. Despite being billed as UC, Chime is more about online conferencing. This is less of a market segment and more of a monkey house that's teeming with not one but several 800-pound gorillas, the likes of Adobe Connect, Cisco WebEx, Citrix GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Skype for Business.

The same can be said of Connect. The market for cloud-based contact center services is alive, thriving, and populated by established providers such as inContact, Five9, and others. Seeing new challengers appearing on the field and prepared to do battle is always great. But AWS faces an uphill battle to dethrone the princes of the Web conferencing and cloud contact center markets.

AWS Powering UC Services
While Amazon may be new and unproven as a provider of conferencing and contact center services, it is considerably more established as a platform provider of others' UC services. Not so many years ago I remember seeing cloud communications services running on AWS infrastructure while in development. But in no way would the providers trust the company's infrastructure as a service (IaaS) with those services after launch.

That's now changed. As others note, AWS lets providers quickly launch services that are scalable, reliable, backed by powerful analytics tools, and running on a platform that's global in scope. AWS is also cost effective compared with leasing data center space for the virtualized servers that typically run cloud-based UC and contact center services. In addition to Chime and Connect, which of course run on AWS, UCaaS and CCaaS offerings also relying on it include:

Interestingly, the proposition isn't always all-or-nothing, where AWS is the sole platform on which a UC service is based. Avaya's Enterprise Cloud for BPO service, for example, is based on Avaya contact center software running in traditional data centers in four -- soon six -- locations around the world. As the company expands into new countries it plans to run the software underpinning the service on AWS.

AWS isn't the only IaaS used in this way. Genesys PureEngage runs on Azure, as does Polycom RealConnect for Office 365, which launched earlier this year. LifeSize provides videoconferencing as a service for 2,500 customers on software running on IBM Cloud. And though not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, BroadSoft introduced a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) option earlier this year. Rather than build out and maintain the infrastructure on which their UC services are based, providers can install either the BroadWorks call control software, the UC-One application, or both on BroadSoft's PaaS. The result is a quicker time to market for providers launching new BroadSoft-based services.

Continue to next page: AWS as Private Data Center Alternative

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AWS as Private Data Center Alternative
AWS is also in the process of becoming an option for businesses purchasing and managing their own UC software, so it's not just for providers launching UC services. Taking a step backward for a moment, most UC software can run as an instance on a virtualized server that most likely resides in a data center. This can be less expensive than running the software on commercial off-the-shelf servers or on dedicated appliances. But it requires the enterprise to purchase, support, and manage a lot of data center technology. IaaS -- whether via AWS or some other offering -- makes managing the OS, networking, storage, and virtualization someone else's problem. (PaaS goes a step further by rolling in middleware and runtime.)

As far as I can tell, AWS deployment isn't a supported option for Cisco UC Manager, Microsoft Skype for Business Server, and most other UC software that would otherwise be deployed either on prem or in the corporate data center. Unify demonstrated OpenScape running on AWS many moons ago. Since then neither customers nor partners have requested to deploy OpenScape this way, so Unify never made the option generally available. However, the company says it's available on request.

But two months ago Avaya quietly added AWS as a fully supported deployment option. Avaya customers purchase licenses as usual, but instead of installing the software on premises or in a private cloud, they run it in AWS. According to Avaya documentation, Aura components that can run in AWS include:

Aura's conferencing and messaging software is conspicuously absent from the deployment guide. That is, the guide says that Communication Manager and other apps deployed in AWS can connect to Aura Conferencing and Avaya Messaging deployed on premises. But I've been told that all Aura applications can now run in AWS, with the sole exception of contact center. So maybe the guide is out of date. Or maybe Avaya has a separate deployment guide specific to messaging and conferencing.

As for Avaya's contact center apps, Oceana can currently run on Google Cloud. An AWS support option is expected for later this year, and Avaya mentioned planned support for Azure at its customer conference earlier this year.

So the big question is whether AWS will be the next big step in UC software deployment. Over the past few years we've seen UC software move from purpose-built hardware to commercial off-the-shelf servers to virtual machines. The virtualization stage was particularly interesting because vendors worked on it for several years before cracking the code that let real-time comms apps run on VMware and other hypervisors. But once one vendor got it to work properly, the rest followed suit within a year or so.

It seems that AWS support should be similar. There's certainly some pent-up demand; finding forum posts from IT managers trying to get Cisco, Mitel, and other UC software running on AWS is easy enough. The question is whether that demand is finally great enough for AWS support to become table stakes in the same way VMware and Citrix support did a few years back.

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