Twilio Who?
Twilio is a cloud based service that enables powerful communication between mobile devices, applications, services, and systems throughout the business in order to bridge the gap between conventional (legacy) communications.
Twilio is a cloud communications platform as a service (CPaaS) company based in San Francisco, California. Twilio allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and perform other communication functions using its web service APIs.
Products include: Voice and Call Centers
One of Twilio’s promises is to rid businesses of the messy telecom hardware by providing a telephony infrastructure web service via a globally available cloud API, allowing web developers to use standard web languages to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into their web, mobile and traditional phone applications.
The company generates over $650 million per year in annual revenue.
Who is Twilio’s biggest competitors?
Twilio’s biggest competitors are Cisco Systems, Avaya, Nexmo, Bandwidth and Plivo.
None of Twilio’s competitors currently compete directly with them across all of product offerings. Strong competitive differentiation derives from Twilio’s Super Network, its user-friendly interface, and its developer-centric self-service business model (Twilio’s self-serve pricing matrix is publicly available and allows for customers to receive automatic tiered discounts as their usage of Twilio’s products increases).
Twilio’s developer-centric self-service business model creates an organization that has huge mind-share vs. its competitors.
Within the cloud communications industry, customers and developers recognize Twilio as the leading “toolbox” for cloud-based communications with a multi-year industry lead. With around one million developers on its platform, it is quite far above its nearest competitor, Nexmo, which states that it has ~100K developers on its platform.
Interesting facts:
Twilio uses Amazon Web Services to host telephony infrastructure and provide connectivity between HTTP and the public switched telephone network (PSTN) through its APIs.
Twilio follows a set of architectural design principles to protect against unexpected outages, and received praise for staying online during the widespread Amazon Web Services outage in April 2011.
Twilio supports the development of open-source software and regularly makes contributions to the open-source community. Early on Twilio launched OpenVBX, an open-source product that lets business users configure phone numbers to receive and route phone calls.
Contact Center Example
Twilio has a fully-programmable contact center platform.
Every aspect of the Flex platform is customizable, from call routing to the color of your agent’s desktop UI. With use ready-made programmable building blocks you can add, remove, or change to build a contact center.
The offer support multi channels.
Companies can integrate chat into their website using pre-built channel widgets. Add voice, video, and rich messaging using Twilio APIs.
It is also easy to add new channels, and optimize a contact center performance with native WFO tools.
Named user pricing – $150 / month
A user is charged a flat rate for each agent, supervisor, or administrator’s seat, regardless of traffic spikes or volume of activity.
