I recently highlighted Twilio as leading lights for CPaaS in 2019. To me, Twilio has quickly become the Microsoft of the CPaaS world. No matter who you talk to about CPaaS, and no matter the context, their name is mentioned. They don't have the major brand advantage and don't play in as many spaces as Microsoft - so just what makes them such a CPaaS force? I started some research into Twilio's plans for 2019 and quickly had too many tabs open to count. This led me to two conclusions. CPaaS is going to be big in 2019. Twilio is going to be big in 2019.
Competition
When looking at natural challengers to Twilio, the CPaaS market isn't short of rivals. For those new to CPaaS, which is most people, these include:
- Vonage (Nexmo acquisition)
- MessageBird
- Brightlink
- Plivo
- 2600Hz
- GlobalReach Technology
- Bandwidth.com
- Sinch
- Voxbone
- CometChat
- The entire CCaaS market
Twilio CPaaS Roadmap
The first thing I looked for when researching Twilio for 2019 was their roadmap. What features and functionality are they planning to introduce over the next quarter, year etc? Access to Twilio's product roadmap is seemingly private - please correct me if I'm wrong in the comments. However, a press release from June points to partners having early access to the Twilio roadmap.
"New Technology Early Access Program - Early access to Twilio’s product roadmap gives partners the opportunity to be the first certified providers of Twilio’s contact centre application platform, Flex, as well as future innovations from Twilio".
This is a great exclusive benefit for existing customers but this didn't help me. And it was a little odd to give access to existing customers and exclude potential customers that might be researching the product.
Digging a little further, the only material publicly available relating to Twilio and roadmap was a blog series on "Taking control of your contact centre roadmap".
There is little benefit of explaining potential plans for a product when you have the power to react so quickly and implement almost whatever changes you need to remain competitive. Twilio as mastered this. Their blogs talk about doing more with APIs and adding to your contact centre as and when any functionality appears - rather than presenting what they're developing. This would be a little archaic for a platform used by millions of developers around the world.
