Software developers are reinventing nearly every aspect of business today.
Yet as developers, we repeatedly encountered an area where we could not innovate—communications.
Because communication is a fundamental human activity and vital to building
great businesses, we wanted to incorporate communications into our software
applications, but the barriers to innovation were too high. Twilio was started
to solve this problem.
We believe the future of communications will be written in software, by the
developers of the world—our customers. By empowering them, our mission
is to fuel the future of communications.
Cloud platforms are a new category of software that enable developers to build
and manage applications without the complexity of creating and maintaining the
underlying infrastructure. These platforms have arisen to enable a fast pace
of innovation across a range of categories, such as computing and storage. We
are the leader in the Cloud Communications Platform category. We enable developers
to build, scale and operate real-time communications within software applications.
Our platform consists of three layers: our Engagement Cloud, Programmable
Communications Cloud and Super Network. Our Engagement Cloud software is a set
of Application Programming Interfaces ("APIs") that handles the higher-level
communication logic needed for nearly every type of customer engagement. These
APIs are focused on the business challenges that a developer is looking to address,
allowing our customers to more quickly and easily build better ways to engage
with their customers throughout their journey. Our Programmable Communications
Cloud software is a set of APIs that enables developers to embed voice, messaging
and video capabilities into their applications. The Programmable Communications
Cloud is designed to support almost all the fundamental ways humans communicate,
unlocking innovators to address just about any communication market. The Super
Network is our software layer that allows our customers software to communicate
with connected devices globally. It interconnects with communications networks
around the world and continually analyzes data to optimize the quality and cost
of communications that flow through our platform. The Super Network also contains
a set of APIs giving our customers access to more foundational components of
our platform, like phone numbers.
We had 48,979 Active Customer Accounts as of December 31, 2017, representing
organizations big and small, old and young, across nearly every industry, with
one thing in common: they are competing by using the power of software to build
differentiation through communications. With our platform, our customers are
disrupting existing industries and creating new ones. For example, our customers
software applications use our platform to notify a diner when a table is ready,
provide enhanced application security through two-factor authentication, connect
potential buyers to real estate agents, and power large, omni-channel contact
centers. The range of applications that developers build with the Twilio platform
has proven to be nearly limitless.
Our goal is for Twilio to be in the toolkit of every software developer in
the world. Because big ideas often start small, we encourage developers to experiment
and iterate on our platform. We love when developers explore what they can do
with Twilio, because one day they may have a business problem that they will
use our products to solve.
Twilios mission is to fuel the future of communications. We enable developers
to build, scale and operate real-time communications within software applications.
We believe every application can be enhanced through the power of communication.
Over time, we believe that all of our communications that do not occur in person
will be integrated into software applications. Our platform approach enables
developers to build this future.
Using our software, developers are able to incorporate communications into
applications that span a range of industries and functionalities. Our Solution
Partner customers, which embed our products in the solutions they sell to other
businesses, are also able to leverage our products to deliver their applications.
Common Use Cases
Anonymous Communications. Enabling users to have a trusted means of communications
where they prefer not to share private information like their telephone number.
Examples include conversations between drivers and riders or texting after meeting
through a dating website.
Alerts and Notifications. Alerting a user that an event has occurred, such as
when a table is ready, a flight is delayed or a package is shipped.
Contact Center. Improving customer support of powering customer care teams with
voice, messaging and video capabilities that integrate with other systems to
add context, such as a callers support ticket history of present location.
Call Tracking. Using phone numbers to provide detailed analytics on phone calls
to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns or lead generation activities
in a manner similar to how web analytics track and measure online activity.
Mobile Marketing. Integrating messaging with marketing automation technology,
allowing organizations to deliver targeted and timely contextualized communications
to consumers.
User Security. Verifying user identity through two-factor authentication prior
to log-in or validating transactions within an applications workflow. This
adds an additional layer of security to any application.
Twilio For Good. Partnering with nonprofit organizations through Twilio.org,
to use the power of communications to help solve social challenges, such as
an SMS hotline to fight human trafficking, an emergency volunteer dispatch system
and appointment reminders for medical visits in developing nations.
While developers can build a broad range of applications on our platform,
certain use cases are more common. Our Engagement Cloud APIs build upon our
Programmable Communications Cloud to offer more fully implemented functionality
for a specific purpose, such as two-factor authentication or skills-based routing
in a contact center, thereby saving developers significant time in building
their applications.
Part of our core strategy is to provide a broad set of lower level building
blocks (i.e. the products in our Programmable Communications Cloud and Super
Network) that can be used to build virtually any use case. By doing this, we
allow developers creativity to flourish across the widest set of use cases—some
of which havent even been invented yet. As we observe what use cases are most
common, and the work flows our customers find most challenging, we create the
products in our Engagement Cloud to bring these learnings to a broader audience.
The higher level APIs we have created in this layer of our platform are focused
on addressing a massive opportunity to recreate and modernize the field of customer
engagement. The means by which most companies engage with their customers is
archaic and disjointed, made more glaring by the pace of development in other
areas of communication. Our products in the Engagement Cloud combine the flexibility
provided by our platform model along with the learnings weve gained over the
past ten years focused on driving success at tens of thousands of customers.
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