Twilio has launched a formal channel program around its communications services delivered via the cloud intended to make it simpler for partners to tap into what the company describes as a $1.4 trillion market opportunity.
The two-tier Twilio Build partner program is designed to appeal to all types of channel partners, including traditional resellers, says Ron Huddleston, chief partner officer at Twilio.
“Before what we had was more of an invite-only program,” says Huddleston.
The Twilio Build program, in contrast, adds a full range of certification and training programs, marketing and sales support and access to a partner success team.
Twilio categorizes every partner as either a technology partner or a consulting partner and offers two levels of registered or Gold partnership built around lead sharing, co-selling or a traditional reselling partnership.
Partners can also gain access to a technology early access program and resell their own applications and service via a new Twilio Build Marketplace that the company will expose to 50,000 existing customers.
The $1.4 trillion market opportunity Twilio is chasing stems from an ongoing transition of voice and video services into the cloud. Many of these services were historically driven by complex unified communications platforms that were delivered as part of an on-premises solution. Now, these services can be programmatically invoked as a cloud service hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using REST application programming interfaces (API).
That approach is also changing the nature of how communications services are being consumed. Instead of making use of dedicated services it’s increasingly becoming common for communications services to be embedded within an application. To take advantage of that shift many partners are evolving into independent software vendors (ISVs) that are building applications around their own intellectual property, says Huddleston.
Competition across the cloud communications sector is already fierce. Just about every provider of a cloud service is making available some form of communications service that can be invoked via an API. The degree to which partners can profit from that already underway transition remains to be seen. But at this point, it’s now a matter of when rather than if that transition will fully occur.
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