As a private company, Twilio does not report its bottom line results, but it reports growth in many variables that drive top line growth, including a 400% growth in its customer base and demonstration of a number of applications and use cases that will drive increased traffic in both SMS-based messaging and minutes of use on its telephony cloud. Today, its employee count is approaching 100. They are primarily located in San Francisco. It opened its UK office in October to support European expansion. Some of the cash infusion is earmarked to support presence in Poland, France, Portugal, Austria, Denmark, Italy, Romania, Greece, Belgium, Czech Republic, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Finland.

Putting the lie to the general critique that many of the Web 2.0 companies – Twitter and Facebook had been cited – generate profits without creating jobs, Twilio has new posts for The company is hiring positions in sales, marketing, and engineering and encourages interested candidates should visit http://twilio.com/jobs.

From a strategic point of view, Twilio’s ability to attract investment signals continued interest in the ever-changing concept of a “The Transformational Telephone Company” – which I think of as a set of resources that comprise “Conversations as a Platform.” Jeff Lawson, one of Twilio’s co-founders, says the company’s sights set on Microsoft’s Skype, which was one of the first IP-based telephony platform providers and, along with Google (whose GoogleVoice rose out of the combination of GrandCentral and Gizmo5), started to simplify the ways that individuals could receive or originate conversations across multiple locations, devices, modalities (text, voice, video) and even time.

These telephony stalwarts demonstrated what was possible on “closed,” proprietary systems. It sparked the imagination of a new generation of telco application developers. Then companies like Voxeo Labs (then called Adhearsion), which now offers a wide range of capabilities to developers through its PRISM platform; the late, lamented Ribbit; and another set of developers around “open PBXs” thrived while building applications on top of Asterisk, VXI, FreeSwitch and others.

With investment, interest and imagination comes action and innovation. 2012 is shaping up to be a year in which the time it takes to conceive of a new service that support better conversations and when it is formally delivered to a mainstream subscribers shrinks from months to weeks (and even days). We’ve already documented how the GroupMe texting service was originated using the Twilio platform in a one-day “hackathon.” After a successful year of service delivery, the company was purchased by Microsoft/Skype for something in excess of $65 million.

In 2012, I expect accelerated activity among the giant companies across telephony, IT and search to continue. Twilio and its community of developers may have its sights set on Skype/Microsoft. The aforementioned Google will continue to grow its presence with a set of offerings that span devices (they own Motorola Mobility), speech processing, call processing, “identity” (with directories embedded in Gmail, G+…) and ultimately eCommerce. That’s where other “giants” in the cloud have come to play: including Amazon Web Services, Saleforce.com and (yes) Oracle. The most interesting “interested parties” in the new ecosystem are the diversified, incumbent telcos: AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, Deutsche Telecom and others. Which brings us back to the service delivery platform providers, especially Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Huawei and others.

2012 will be a great year for developers around the world!

The service is described in more detail here. In addition to call routing and queuing, the system can capture and transcribe voice messages, record calls or let callers leave a message. Local numbers are available in the U.S. and Canada, but the opportunistic ZenDesk promises more countries to be added as demand builds.

NAR is the organization behind the REALTOR service mark. The package, which is described on this in the REALTOR.org Web site, was designed jointly by the NAR and Ifbyphone. It helps agents optimize their advertising/spending by using call tracking to discover the source of leads. More importantly it uses ifbyphone’s cloud-based voice and call processing resources to serve as a “virtual contact center,” complete with interactive voice response (to screen callers and perform rudimentary call distribution), voice messaging and call forwarding to reach mobile agents.

Since its launch in 2005. IfByPhone has successfully added features and functions to its cloud-based service delivery platform. Eighteen months ago, we posted this story about a three-tiered offering which, at the time, included Telephony API-based voice mashups (for do-it-yourselfers), “Rent-an-App-and-Integrate,” for tech-savvy businesses ready to take a hybrid approach to “Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBPs) and “Stage 3″ – which Opus Research now calls “Voice in the Cloud”.

As we noted back then, the competition for Voice in the Cloud comes from the likes of Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, and perhaps Microsoft along with the “pure plays” like West Interactive, Voxeo or Angel.com. It is also becoming a domain where enterprise infrastructure providers (especially Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya) are pursuing a “hybrid” approach to supporting multi-channel contact center strategies with “hosted” partners like SpanLink or Teletech. All-in-all, when you include CRM, call tracking, marketing optimization and the other key elements of Conversational Commerce, it is easy to see how “Voice in the Cloud” is foundational to a category of enterprise spending that will exceed $10 billion in 2011.

The acquisition marks an acceleration of West’s mobile strategy. Smoothstone’s value proposition has evolved over the years. For much of the time it served as a single-point-of-contact for medium sized firms with multiple-sites and multiple vendors to work with as they migrate to IP-based platforms. The company lists both Cisco and Avaya as its strategic partners in the managed services channel. What has set it apart more recently is its relationship with Sprint, characterized as “a strategic alliance to bring mobile workers the functionality of a cloud-based PBX” over the carrier’s wireless broadband network.

Smoothstone extends its clients’ enhanced communications capabilities to mobile employees through its Mobile Connect product. Its downloadable apps for both iOS (Apple) and Android-based phones enable users to take advantage of the company’s PBX-like features, including access to the corporate directory, abbreviated dialing to other employees, long-distance and international calls at the corporate rate, voice mail and conferencing.

As noted above, West will continue to have two distinct lines of business for its multiple business units. Smoothstone joins the Unified Communciations group which houses Conferencing and outbound Alerts and Notifications, as well as System Integration and Consulting. For the record, West’s financial statements show that UC, for the first time, is more than half of the revenues of the parent company (exceeding $1.2 billion in revenue in 2010 – up 8%, compared to Communiations Services’ (CS) $1.17 billion in revenues and a 6% decline). More importantly, UC is proving to be more profitable than CS, with roughly 60% operating margins, compared to closer to 50% for CS. With the acquisition of Smoothstone the center of gravity for West Corporation is destined to move toward general managed IP-based services.

As for contact center and self-service businesses over in CS, everyone should take heart in the fact that, in the world of Conversational Communications, traditional contact center functions – customer acquisition, customer support, upsell/cross-sell, and all that – going enterprise-wide (and beyond). Conversations between and among employees, customers, prospects and “influencers” take place on a plethora of platforms and the synthetic division between UC and CS will be a challenge to maintain. By having experience, customers and products in both camps, West is in a good position to manage how enterprise-wide IP-based assets can be brought into the talk paths between its clients, their employees and their customers.

As asymmetrical marketing specialist Joe Bentzel notes on his new Cloudwagon blog, EMC has another “family of products” carrying the VMWare brand, that position it to be the “poster child” for the next generation of software superpowers. EMC well-knows that its success both in virtualized storage and application orchestration depends on how well it works with others, as well as the opportunities it creates for its partners whose main lines of business are application development and integration. Joe calls the new area of opportunity “Superpower 2.0″. As I’ll be pointing out in the coming months and years, it is also fertile ground for Recombinant Communications, mostly because a the approach taken by EMC, both through Atmos and VMWare provide the level of flexibility and agility required for successful RC implementations.

My belief is that Google introduces its Web services so softly because it can afford to do so. It can gauge the organic demand for selected, hosted Web services and let the market (or at least the geeky development community) decide which ones move to the next level. At the same time it is able to present instances of its productivity suite (Calendar, Docs, Gmail, and Tasks), information/publishing services (News, Reader, Book Reader, Maps, Goog411) and other useful/social services (YouTube, Translate, orkut) in ways that make all of its “properties” potentially more valuable as developers invent more ways to leverage these existing assets. That’s the essence of Recombinant Telephony.

Ultimately, over the next few years, all will be caught up in The Wave.