Published on the 27/04/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
The fact that Google has bought Interactive Intelligence’s customer engagement solution, which runs on Amazon’s cloud, signals the growing IT spending power of business units…
So says Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO, Dr Donald Brown.
Once upon a time it would have been unthinkable that a major IT vendor would buy products or services off a direct competitor. Today it’s just par for the course.
So when Google bought Interactive Intelligence’s PureCloud to manage its customer experiences, the fact that it is hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud was not a deal breaker according to Brown. “It speaks to the power of the business units,” he said during a visit to Sydney this week. “The business doesn’t care where it runs.”
According to newly released Telsyte research commissioned by Interactive Intelligence, 79 per cent of organisations now have lines of business with their own ICT budgets. Analyst Rodney Gedda said that line of business procurement was one of the factors driving rising demand for cloud based solutions, as the IT department was not required to spin up servers in order to run line of business focused applications.
Gedda warned however that; “It is best practice probably to involve IT because there may be integration issues.”
Whether Google involved its IT department when signing up for PureCloud isn’t known – but it is one of the companies which has adopted the solution that Interactive Intelligence launched last year after re-architecting its system to run on public cloud. Brown acknowledged that early plans to take a cloud agnostic approach were quickly confined to the too hard basket, and Amazon Web Services selected as the public cloud platform for the solution.
In Australia and New Zealand 15 companies signed on for PureCloud in the first quarter of the year – though none were existing Interactive Intelligence users. This cohort may in fact be wise to wait until mid-year when Dr Brown said the company would unveil a new pricing model for existing users, which takes account of the amount already invested in Interactive Intelligence on premise solutions.
Interactive Intelligence has around 200 customers across Australia and New Zealand, and grew by about 40 per cent during 2015.
The company is now looking for ways to transition at least some of those customers across to the PureCloud solution which will over the next two to three years become as fully featured as the company’s current on premise solution according to Brendan Maree, senior vice president for ANZ and Japan.
“We can’t give it to customers for free, but there will be a significant discount. If we can reduce the cost of cloud by 30—40 per cent it makes economic sense for those customers,” said Dr Brown. Maree said that the first ANZ business to transition to PureCloud was about to take the plunge.
