Twilio, at its SIGNAL 2018 conference this week, moved to expand the range of communications services it provides by first acquiring SendGrid, a provider of email services that can be invoked via an application programming interface (API), for approximately $2 billion. Twilio also revealed it is partnering with Stripe to democratize access to payment services from within the Twilio integrated voice response (IVR) service running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Stripe is the initial launch partner for Twilio Pay. But Twilio expects to extend that capability to a range of payment services that will soon become a simple API call away from any application, says Kris Gutta, senior product manager for programmable voice at Twilio.
“We’re going to democratize payment services,” says Gutta.
At the same time, Twilio also announced a capability through which organizations can invoke an API to achieve Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance within the Twilio IVR service.
Finally, Twilio also unfurled Twilio AutoPilot, a service for building conversational bots, and announced that Twilio Flex, a contact center that is accessed as a service, is now generally available.
In general, IT solutions are increasingly being driven by cloud services that are programmatically invoked to create a custom solution, says. In the case of embedding a payment service into those solutions, Twilio is now making possible to accomplish that task by using a single line of code, says Gutta.
All three offerings illustrate how cloud services are leveraging API to reduce the complexity associated with building what were once complex applications. The challenge solution providers now face is programmatically weaving voice, video, email and text messaging together to provide innovative applications that can be consumed within any application by almost any size organization. In effect, communications services are rapidly becoming an expected feature of any application solution.
At the same time, more than a few solution providers are still adjusting to the fact that communication systems that once resided primarily on-premises are now becoming a series of programmable services invoked via the cloud. Many solution providers that have historically focused on these solutions still lack the programming skills required to make this transition.
Of course, the channel much like nature abhors a vacuum. Rather than if, it’s now more a question of when solution providers will make the transition to communications services delivered via the cloud.
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