[bkruse]

This is a fantastic move for Amazon and I'll tell you why. The cost of long distance is nearing 0 and application providers are making bank. The pricing is also extremely disruptive. Most contact centers price minutes/DIDs just like Amazon but ALSO charge a per-agent per-month fee. [1]

All of the contact center solutions mentioned so far were customers of mine at MagicJack. We did wholesale long distance for them. The one trend in the industry is that long-distance continues to fall fast, but the pricing of telecom-related apps stayed the same.

Since I am no longer under NDA, the average cost of long distance (US Domestic) at MagicJack when I left in 2013 was $0.0017/minute!!

For those saying contact centers won't move over because the investment - I will tell you that we lost and gained 1,000 agent operations over 10% cost savings every single month.

[1] - http://blog.kunnect.com/2014/10/how-much-does-cloud-based-ca...

[nutanc]

Absolutely right. Though in India we have been charging the regular call center model for our cloud call center, http://cloudagent.in, we knew the model will not continue for long, especially in the US. So for our US product getkookoo.com we did away with the per agent pricing. We went with a zero agent rental and fixed monthly cost model with free minutes included[1]. [1]-http://getkookoo.com/getting-saas-pricing-right-pricing-clou...

[gz5]

2 other reasons i like:

amazon can integrate with their marketplaces...giving them an inherent ability to enrich and monetize contact center which others don't have.

trojan horse for improving their AI services - nice data to train lex and polly on - and for lex and polly to self-learn on...

[cavisne]

I would be surprised if amazon has access to the voice recordings, maybe something can be found in the terms of use?

Customer data is pretty closely guarded at aws, I would be surprised if they would jeopardize uptake by medical and financial sectors for the sake of a small amount of training data (when they already have all the data they could want from amazon.com)

[mjw305]

The fact of the matter is there is nothing new or transformative about Amazon Connect. Anyone who knows something about how contact center technology can attest to this.

Read analysis here: http://blog.fenero.com/amazon-connect-is-not-only-over-price...

[ddrgn]

Wow, thanks mjw305! I looked Fenero up due to your comment, and they fit all my needs on call center and ACD/ predictive dialer. I do need to give a shoutout to Fenero and their VP of customer development, Charlie Callari, who called and did a video training showing me the ins and outs of their system, few minutes after I signed up for their free trial. I'm impressed, to say the least. DD