I am taking that long bet. I am a Twilio system integrator and have been a super fan for almost 5 years. I believe they will become that gorilla. In their growth strategy from the S1 their goal is to expand focus on the enterprise which from where I sit is going to be the way they turn into that gorilla.
As they move into that enterprise market their competition is not the telcom API providers https://www.quora.com/Who-are-Twilios-competitors It will be the large monolithic (on prem or in cloud) products like Genesys, Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, etc which represents a huge market.
If you believe the logical market trends they lay out, and I do, that:
- agility in the way software is developed and deployed (the move towards continuous integration) drives innovation
- the availability of services like Twilio that provide easy to integrate building blocks of functionality make it easier to build
- building rather than buying can allow enterprises to differentiate service
Then you can see how Twilio will start eating into that $45B market while staying way out in front of those other telcom API providers who may see the same trends. Going public with all the scrutiny that comes with it I am sure is part of that strategy. Even if the big guys start buying the smaller API providers as Cisco did with Tropo they are not going to cannibalize their existing monolithic communication business.
So I believe if Twilio can help drive those trends specifically in the communication software space then I believe they will win big. Just like AWS started selling a means to provision and scale servers out quickly but today sell a whole suite of tools to transform the way infrastructure is managed and software is deployed Twilio will go from automating calls and sms to transforming how enterprise build and deploy software to communicate with customers.
As they move into that enterprise market their competition is not the telcom API providers https://www.quora.com/Who-are-Twilios-competitors It will be the large monolithic (on prem or in cloud) products like Genesys, Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, etc which represents a huge market.
If you believe the logical market trends they lay out, and I do, that: - agility in the way software is developed and deployed (the move towards continuous integration) drives innovation - the availability of services like Twilio that provide easy to integrate building blocks of functionality make it easier to build - building rather than buying can allow enterprises to differentiate service
Then you can see how Twilio will start eating into that $45B market while staying way out in front of those other telcom API providers who may see the same trends. Going public with all the scrutiny that comes with it I am sure is part of that strategy. Even if the big guys start buying the smaller API providers as Cisco did with Tropo they are not going to cannibalize their existing monolithic communication business.
So I believe if Twilio can help drive those trends specifically in the communication software space then I believe they will win big. Just like AWS started selling a means to provision and scale servers out quickly but today sell a whole suite of tools to transform the way infrastructure is managed and software is deployed Twilio will go from automating calls and sms to transforming how enterprise build and deploy software to communicate with customers.