Jeff Lawson, the outspoken Twilio CEO, is fond of explaining his company this way: "We're software people." He's spent the past several years advocating that enterprises break from traditional CPE-based models of communications architectures, and instead move to the cloud-based model of API-enabled communications integration on which Twilio has built its business model. That's what makes today's new product announcement from Twilio so intriguing.
Twilio this morning announced availability of a public beta of Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking, a service that represents the company's first foray into SIP trunking. The service includes some elements that represent a break from traditional SIP trunking offers from the competitive carriers that have been in the SIP trunking market from the start, as well as from the incumbent carriers that have been, it's safe to say, reluctant players.
To get a sense of how complicated it can still be to procure and provision a service that, in its basic form, is meant to do nothing more than emulate long-distance telephony, check out Andrew Prokop's recent No Jitter post, Overcoming SIP Phobia. Given these and more technically oriented obstacles, together with the incumbent carriers' reluctance to cannibalize PRI services, the last thing you expect to see these days is something new in SIP trunking.
But Twilio appears to have a couple of twists, and some features that attempt to do more than just replicate voice telephony on more cost-efficient IP-based trunks. When Lawson briefed me on the announcement last month, he stressed the lack of what he called the "shenanigans" that many customers describe encountering from the traditional telco sales process, which he described as "a long heavyweight sales process" followed by arduous manual provisioning.
In contrast, the new Twilio offer is built on a two-tiered model where the customer connects with Twilio, which in turn wholesales SIP trunks from carrier partners. This lets Twilio insert some unique functionality of its own, most notably automated provisioning that lets enterprises add and reconfigure connectivity themselves--with no long-term contracts. Twilio is also offering what it calls "multi-tenanted" SIP trunks, which means essentially the ability to divide a SIP trunk into multiple virtual SIP trunks so that a single enterprise can allocate different pieces of the service to different internal departments or organizations, to simplify chargeback.
This sort of virtualized treatment isn't entirely new to the SIP trunking world. Competitors and even the incumbents offer services they variously describe as "pooling" or "bursting," wherein an enterprise isn't confined to a static capacity at each location but instead can contract for an overall amount of capacity across the network and dynamically re-allocate capacity based on peak traffic loads in different places. So it's never been a technical obstacle. It's more a willingness to meet a customer need.
The service includes SMS/MMS messaging over SIP trunks (though the company release says this will be available just "in some markets" for the public beta) and will let enterprise customers record all voice calls with a single flip of a "switch." In addition, it will take advantage of Twilio's two-tier model for dynamic call routing over the best-quality network in areas where the service is provisioned by multiple carriers.
The idea of launching a SIP trunk offering with an emphasis on innovative features rather than price arbitrage is new to this market. Quite simply, the more established competitive carriers have enjoyed, as their chief differentiator, their willingness to sell the service in the first place and market it aggressively. Their pricing was certainly attractive to enterprises that had been paying for PRIs--though in some places the incumbents countered by dropping PRI prices. In any case, one major challenge to adopting a competitive carrier was always the ability of those carriers to serve all of an enterprise's locations. Twilio claims its offer will provide SIP trunking termination in "almost every country," and local phone numbers and points of presence in 50 countries. Whether that will translate into wider real-world availability than the competitive carriers offer remains to be seen.
It's still hard to imagine the pace of SIP trunking rollouts being dictated by anything other than the actions of the incumbent carriers that dominate enterprise wide-area services. The relationships with large enterprise buyers are just too well entrenched. But just as the earlier generation of competitors challenged on the basis of price and the willingness and ability to actually deliver the service, so Twilio is adding a new dimension to SIP trunking: a focus on for what those trunks might actually be used.
