Why Amazon Web Services for PureCloud?Why Amazon Web Services for PureCloud?
Interactive Intelligence has placed bets on AWS for its multitenant cloud solution, but it has its pros and cons.
June 16, 2015
Interactive Intelligence has placed bets on AWS for its multitenant cloud solution, but it has its pros and cons.
Last week Interactive Intelligence held its annual, global Interactions event for users, partners, analysts, and consultants. The big news was the introduction of PureCloud Engage, the customer engagement component of the company's multi-tenant PureCloud platform (detailed in an earlier No Jitter post from Michelle Burbick).
After attending the keynote presentations and a few breakout sessions, one of the common themes in PureCloud discussions was that the solution is delivered on Amazon Web Services (AWS). To learn more, I sat down with Glenn Nethercutt, Interactive Intelligence Chief Architect for PureCloud, responsible for overall AWS architecture strategy: scalability, multi-region strategy, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, service consistency, new technology evaluation, and continuous delivery mechanisms. I also met with Jason Alley, Solutions Marketing Manager for PureCloud Engage and reviewed a presentation delivered at the conference by an AWS Solution Architect, Scott Ward.
Alley and Nethercutt emphasized three key advantages AWS provides to PureCloud:
In the future, Nethercutt said PureCloud might also employ the Amazon Machine Learning service, to take artificial intelligence to smaller problems than has been cost-effectively possible in the past.
The graphic below highlights one of my key takeaways: Of the 50 services and applications that comprise the AWS platform, Interactive Intelligence is using 30, or 60%, to deploy PureCloud. As Nethercutt explained, the choice of AWS was not just about virtualization of the PureCloud application in the cloud, it was also about services. Using AWS services allows Interactive Intelligence to concentrate on application development, not on building utilities. Nethercutt says that Amazon likes to describe this as them handling the "undifferentiated heavy lifting." Ultimately this should mean a shorter time-to-market.
For all its advantages, using Amazon Web Services is not without its drawbacks. Currently AWS has no data center on the African continent, of concern to Interactive Intelligence partners and customers in South Africa, where the company has a growing presence. Asked about this during the final session of the conference, CEO Don Brown walked through the fact that AWS supplies the application logic, but not the telephony communications services. A South African customer could be supported from a region in Australia with no detrimental latency and have communications capability provided locally via the Interaction Edge device.
A potentially bigger drawback is the customer or partner who wants its own "copy" of PureCloud to run in its own datacenter. Because of the interdependencies between PureCloud and Amazon Web Services, while possible, it would likely require a complex hybrid model to deploy.
Both of these potential drawbacks are long-term issues. In the short and medium term, Interactive Intelligence has plenty of geographic and market segment opportunity to harvest with PureCloud.
To read up on the other components of Interactive's PureCloud solution, Collaborate and Communicate, see "Interactive Intelligence Goes Even Bigger on Cloud."
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