Market Perspectives

Twilio is a technology provider in the cloud communication and customer engagement industries. Founded in 2008, the company has grown to serve over 190,000 customers worldwide, including large enterprises in technology, healthcare, finance and retail. Twilio's platform enables organizations to communicate with customers across various channels, including voice, text, email and video.

The software is used to create custom communication workflows, integrate communications into existing systems and applications and automate various business processes. This has made Twilio a popular choice among developers, marketers and customer service teams looking for reliable, scalable and flexible communication software.

One of Twilio’s key strengths is its developer-friendly platform, which provides easy-to-use application programming interfaces and software development kits that allow organizations to quickly integrate communication capabilities into existing systems and applications. It rates highly among organizations looking for a cost-effective way to add communication capabilities to products and services. Twilio offers a comprehensive set of documentation, tutorials and support resources that make it easy for developers to get started and build robust communication workflows.

Twilio’s offerings span multiple product categories, including contact center, marketing and customer engagement platform, a customer data platform, messaging tools and a developer platform for building digital communication applications. Twilio’s key products are contact center platform Flex and Twilio Engage, an automation platform that combines its Segment customer data platform with omnichannel experience handling. Omnichannel experience handling is differentiator to ensure consistency and knowledge of interactions across channels.

Twilio's growth in the marketplace will depend on several factors. First, whether contact center buyers gravitate to a platform that’s open for advanced customization and development, as opposed to more turnkey systems. Second, how well the company articulates the connections between its marketing-centric applications and engagement of its platform with those that are more focused on customer service environments. This linkage will be key in getting buyers to see Twilio as a platform fit for cross-departmental customer experience processes.

Twilio has done a good job melding voice and digital channels and assembling the pieces (partly through acquisitions) of niche software that move it beyond basic cloud-based service to a broader digital communications platform. We assert by 2026, 7 in 10 organizations will move all or part of contact center technology into the cloud to attain greater flexibility and scalability.

There are some potential risks and challenges that Twilio may face in the future. For example, the company straddles multiple competitive markets: customer experience management, contact center, communication platform, unified communications and messaging. Twilio needs to better articulate the benefits of its developer-centric approach to communications and why its customer data platform is essential for managing customer-related information from any interaction.

Many organizations have contact center and communications needs that should be unified in the cloud. Buyers looking for a platform that is digital-first, cloud-based and puts openness and development at the top of the priority list should consider Twilio.