Opus Research seldom makes note of personnel changes on this site, but the hiring of Jose de Castro as Sr. Architect for Twilio Flex confirms the reality of a new world order for the Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS). The transformation has been more than a decade in the making and has been documented here dating back to the time that cloud-based contact center specialist Voxeo chartered a new subsidiary called Tropo as “a free service to voice application developers to take advantage of a standard API and a growing range of ‘frameworks’ for the application community to build more voice and telephony applications.”

Absent the word “free”, Tropo’s mission statement resonates to this day; however it looks like Twilio, along with leaders in Cloud-based computing and communications, including Amazon, Google and the top Cloud-based Contact Center providers, are carrying the cause forward.

Tropo’s launch coincided with significant milestones in Twilio’s path from ambitious startup to today’s Telco-API Unicorn. In two rounds of financing, including this Series B involving Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures, Twilio attracted $15 million to drive development of what Opus Research has called “Telco in Legoland.” The race was on with both Tropo and Twilio building tools to corral Web developers to add telephony functions to their bag of tricks.

In the ensuing years, it was as if Tropo and Twilio evolved in parallel universes. In 2012, Tropo, with de Castro as its CTO, launched its CPaas platform called “Ameche” (an homage to Don Ameche, the actor who portrayed the title character in the biopic “The Story of Alexander Graham Bell”. It provided tools for developers to build rich mobile phone apps, meaning that gave incumbent telcos a role to play beyond serving as “fat, dumb pipes” for over-the-top services. When Jose delivered this clinic at Alan Quayle’s TADS Developer Summit in early 2013, Tropo had well over 250,000 registered developers.

Twilio, in the meantime, was finding great success on its own. As I explain in these notes from its developer conference in San Francisco in the fall of 2011, co-founder Jeff Lawson exhorted a packed house of “phonepreneurs” to get their piece of what he described as a $250 billion market for phone systems and software. As I noted at the time, one of the biggest innovations introduced at the conference was streamlined billing system that allowed Twilio application providers to set up accounts that billed usage to a separate account. This gave them a way to simplify billing to their customers.

Developers flocked to Twilio, seeing them as a low-cost alternative to incumbent carriers and providers of gateways for handling SMS messaging in bulk. Tropo pursued a strategy that had greater appeal to incumbent carriers such as AT&T and Deutsch Telekom, who were evaluating options for partnerships that would delay their descent into commoditization by integrating their back-end systems that supported billing into tool sets that could insert more telephony capabilities into mobile apps.

By 2013, Tropo’s parent company Voxeo was acquired by Aspect Software and, in the process, Tropo Labs was spun-off as as an independent company that was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2015. At that point de Castro assumed the role of CTO for the advanced collaboration platforms powering Cisco’s Spark and, later, Webex Teams. The kernel of Tropo’s technology and staff resided in the Unified Communications and Collaboration unit where it fostered innovation and creativity internally, but the spirit of open APIs and developer tools had greatly diminished.

Flex Muscles up on Twilio’s Super Network

What attracted de Castro to Twilio are the same things that have drawn tens of thousands of developers to the community: simplicity, economy and enthusiasm. Yet, when looking at specifically at Flex, he saw a mature set of tools, features, and, yes, APIs and Connectors tailored toward enabling developers to build 21st century contact centers at scale. Its closest rival, in terms of openness, scalability and pricing transparency is Amazon Connect. Both give the growing number of developers who are embedded in the IT staff of major brands, banks, healthcare providers and government agencies new confidence to incoporate the CPaaS stack into the critical talkpaths they maintain across all channels with their customers and employees.

The Build-it-Yourself attitude of these customer/developers make them a font of innovation that Twilio is happy to share with the rest of its user community. The launch of Task Router provides a great example. Twilio initially introduced it in response to specific developer needs. Then it added new capabilities and functions, like multi-queuing, additional language support and two-factor authentication as new needs became apparent. In that last case, the company went outside and acquired Authy in order to make two-factor authentication native to Flex.

In all instances the Twilio advantage is powered by its Super Network, the trade name for the carrier-agnostic approach to interconnection and communications transport. Twilio takes responsibility for affordability, reliability and redundancy, as well as compliance to GDPR, ISO27001, Privacy Shield and Cloud Security Alliance to address privacy and security concerns around the globe.

In the past, Opus Research has been dismissive of the term “Unified Communications” because it was a marketing umbrella for individual vendors “unified” product offerings. As Twilio puts the former CTO of Tropo into its Sr. Architect role, it represents a step toward true unification by placing emphasis on an open approach to incorporating new features and functions on public clouds through published APIs. We were only ten years ahead of the curve when we pointed to the world of “Telcos in Legoland”. The movie is coming to theaters near you.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles