“The team has grown over the years and is now a large group of experienced specialists"
For almost three years, we have been working on a completely new solution. Built from scratch, cloud-native with the most modern technology, integrated in the Microsoft Office 365 suite, with the latest Microsoft Graph API. And now, our scalable and flexible customer service suite is publicly available: Luware Nimbus! An important milestone, a new chapter in our history.
With Teams, Microsoft has combined their expertise and experience of multiple worlds: The cloud architecture and scalability of Consumer Skype, the development of business applications like Skype for Business, voice over IP communication, and user experience. Microsoft has put all this expertise into building Teams – a powerful communication platform that performs and scales to any size.
At the Microsoft tech-conference ‘Build’ in May 2017, Microsoft revealed that they were going to release APIs for Teams, enabling Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) like Luware to build cloud-native applications for customer service scenarios. I remember flying back to Zurich from the conference with one of our leading software developers: We were very excited about this new opportunity that Teams offered. And it was clear that we were not just going to take our on-prem solutions and build a connector for Teams. Instead, we would develop a new cloud-native solution.
“Building a cloud-native solution, meant for us, to build it completely from scratch. We left the comfort zone of Skype for Business, and of the development of on-prem software with Windows Server technologies,” explains Michael Jakob, CTO and co-founder of Luware. Some of our leading software developers started evaluating different technologies and analyzing our learnings from the past ten years of software development, operations, and customer projects. We investigated different orchestration and management technologies, runtimes, microservice architecture, databases and platforms. Furthermore, we reflected our complete software development, including automated testing, test driven development, continuous integration and delivery as well as the development process itself.
Michael Jakob (CTO) and Philipp Beck (CEO)
In early 2018, we launched into a new era of software development with a small team of four of our strongest developers who started to build ‘Nimbus’. “The team has grown over the years and is now a large group of experienced specialists with the desire to build a promising pioneer software. Thanks to our great teamwork, ambition and dedication, we have built a fantastic solution,” states Anastasya Frolova, Project Manager for Nimbus. And now, Nimbus is available to the public! Luware Nimbus is one customer service suite for all requirements around customer communication. We offer different ‘editions’ – think of it as feature bundles – for Call Queuing & Routing and Recording; and we will soon launch further editions for Attendant Console and Contact Center.
Nimbus is a Software as a Service (SaaS); a subscription-based model. Customers have the flexibility to mix and match our editions according to their needs and upgrade anytime. Naturally, all updates of the SaaS platform are included in the price. Thanks to the cloud-native application development, we can easily update Nimbus with new features and the high level of automation allows us to make changes continuously, effortlessly, and predictably. Furthermore, modern tools allow us to monitor the status of Nimbus, empowering us to proactively detect problems and trigger appropriate processes for analysis and resolution.
On-prem and federated solutions have always struggled with scalability. Teams and Nimbus on the other hand, are designed to scale and to perform. Their modern architecture and the worldwide network of Azure datacenters ensures that there is low latency and allows to scale to indefinite number of users – to accelerate speed, empower growth and leverage the potential of collaboration and communication.
Nimbus runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud which means that Luware and our customers can benefit from Microsoft’s worldwide data centers and cloud services. We currently have a cluster in Switzerland and Germany to fulfill the European law requirements of data privacy and security. But Nimbus doesn’t just run in Azure, it also allows deep integration with Microsoft Office 365 and can utilize Azure services, e.g. the humanlike Text-to-Speech, Power BI and Power Automate. These integrations expand Nimbus’ features and leverage the Microsoft ecosystem. For example, if Microsoft adds additional languages to their text-to-speech or another CRM connector to Power Automate, these will automatically be available in Nimbus. Microsoft is investing heavily into Azure’s capabilities and I am excited for what they will release and on how we can utilize it in Nimbus.
Over the last three years, most of our effort went into building the foundation of Nimbus – the architecture, the technology, the framework. The launch of our first editions add Call Queueing & Routing functionality to Teams. I am excited that we can already offer some great features with these editions, such as our visual workflow editor and CRM integration with Power Automate. With the foundation in place, we can now focus on building more features for various use cases. And thus, together with Microsoft, we can empower every person and organization to achieve more. Check out our currently available editions and stay up to date on any Nimbus News.