CorvisaCloud Adds Platform Play to Contact Center OfferCorvisaCloud Adds Platform Play to Contact Center Offer

Going beyond the current industry model, a new company aims to put a contact center application platform in the Cloud as a service.

CorvisaCloud, a subsidiary of Novation Companies, Inc., announced today its hosted voice and SMS platform. The platform announcement is described as expanding its cloud contact center offering from a product suite to a product-plus-platform solution. Lots of nice buzzwords, but who the heck are these guys and why should anyone care?

Admittedly, it took a very persistent PR firm to finally wrangle 30 minutes on my calendar to hear the pitch. That persistence paired with the fact that while racing around the Enterprise Connect show floor I saw CorvisaCloud's somewhat sizable and not empty booth. I made a mental note to follow-up. After spending almost twice the allotted time with the company's President and CIO, Matt Lautz, I'm glad I did and will answer the questions posed above.

Parent company Novation has its background in finance and is now a holding company that owns and operates early-stage businesses in the technology-enabled services industry. CorvisaCloud began as IVR Central, a Milwaukee startup that Novation first began using in its own contact centers and later acquired.

After the acquisition, Novation invested in CorvisaCloud and continued development on the initial application, to better meet the needs of its 450-agent, 3-location contact center. Over the course of 16 months, they did a closed beta test with 5-10 clients, ranging in size from 5 to 1,500 agent seats. The goal was to develop an active-active SaaS contact center solution that would scale to hundreds and hundreds of agents.

In October 2013, CorvisaCloud launched the application publicly and has already had some wins. One is described as a 600-seat Boston-based contact center that--with another cloud contact center solution--was experiencing an average of 1 hour of downtime per day. Reliability and uptime is one of the core tenets of CorvisaCloud's service, with US-based data centers in Chicago and Kansas City, and points-of-presence in Amsterdam and Hong Kong for US-based multinational clients.

But at this point, cloud services offering better uptime is an old story. It's today's announcement--of CorvisaCloud's platform capabilities--that may set the company apart. After hearing Lautz's explanation, it seems that CorvisaCloud could be described as a combination of Twilio and a cloud contact center solution. In addition to having table-stakes telephony, ACD and IVR functionality (voice and SMS today, Web chat and email coming soon), the CorvisaOne Platform allows customers and developers to customize the operation of CorvisaCloud applications.

Lautz's discussion then got a little technical for me (Lua-based programming language, GIT repositories). When I pushed back, he explained that the target market for the platform is both enterprise customers and developers. The terms that were Greek to me make sense to the developer community that he is also targeting with his messaging.

Which brings me to the final question I asked Lautz: What is your plan to take over the world? The company sells through its direct sales force, using telephone sales personnel located regionally. For larger opportunities, CorvisaCloud sends its implementation teams on site in a consulting role to help onboard clients. CorvisaCloud's marketing activities to promote its brand and generate leads for its sales force include attendance at user conferences and trade show events as well as participation in developer events.

While cloud-based contact center vendors have been highlighting APIs and Web Services integration in their messaging, CorvisaCloud seems to be upping the ante. Time will tell whether the aPaaS (application Platform as a Service) message resonates with contact center decision makers.

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