The Hows and Whys of Twilio’s Demise
How the CPaaS Will Lose Relevance
If you haven’t ready Dominic Kent’s article, What Does the Future Hold for CPaaS in 2019, I recommend it. Well written, and well sourced, it provides an excellent overview of the market players, and the business drivers. Dave Michels (who is my favorite analyst, bar none, as he’s no bull) states the case with his usual insight and clarity:
Communications are inherently customised. A business can’t just go out and implement a new communications solution. Instead, each user and the system as a whole requires customisation. There are features, classes of services, policies, etc. The solutions for enterprise communications are like snowflakes — no two alike.
I couldn’t agree more. Communications enabled applications are inherently customized, and no two solutions are the same. But, in my experience, creating any software solution is largely a game of getting the building blocks correct. The building blocks of the CPaaS are text messages, voice sessions and API calls. Because of the history of CPaaS, and the history of visionaries that built them, these were logical choices, but they are inefficient from a development standpoint, and will be quickly commoditized from a business standpoint. As a tool for creating customized communications solutions, CPaaS has a limited lifespan and scope. Let me explain.
As an analogy, consider written language. Letters form words, combinations of words form sentences. Points are captured in paragraphs; chapters hold arguments. Whereas it is absolutely true that a dictionary holds all of the words for all of the books in your kindle, you would hardly claim that your dictionary contains all of the same ideas. Writing a book is a case study in the selection of words for the sentences, and combining those sentences into paragraphs and chapters that carry the ideas. From a fundamental standpoint, we think in words, but words are composed from letters.
Customized communications applications have a similar hierarchy. Just like the fundamental of words are letters, the fundamentals of communications are text messages and phone calls. . For well known, and understandable, historical reasons, communications technology focuses on the letters. As communications professionals, we consider voice as measured in DS0s, we think of messages as SMS. CPaaS solutions provide us with a direct way of accessing these letters to extend the functionality of software.
The problem is that today’s CPaaS focuses one level too low for efficient development of applications, and one level too low to avoid the commodity trap. It’s true that no two communications solutions are identical, but that’s not because you can’t use the same text message or voice call. No two communications solutions are identical not because we need different kinds of voice call, but because the purposes of the calls are different. It is trivial to write a voice survey that is identical for collecting an abused spouse’s story or for collecting the repair history of an Abram’s tank. What isn’t identical? The data that’s collected, both in the actual details of the survey, and the way that the data is used in other software systems. Today’s CPaaS offers are one level too low in functionality, and have no data fluency about them, at all. There is no differentiating factor other than quality and price that differentiates a text message handled by Twilio and Nexmo.
Consider, in contrast, a CPaaS that operated on the level of the conversation. Instead of concentrating on a single text message, consider a platform that focused on a series of text messages that resulted in a set of collected data. This data is unique, no other platform could possibly have the same data. Instead of providing assistance in the sending and receiving of a message, imagine a CPaaS that could seamlessly send my collected data to Salesforce or a MongoDB. Now that would help. For workflow, for business communications, the game is in the data, not in the text message.
Twilio, Nexmo and MessageBird provide a valuable service; I don’t really want to deploy my own SMSC and programmable switches. But the real value, the real accelerant, the real backbone of business communications is the data that’s collected. The next generation of CPaaS is conversational, because the future of CPaaS is to aid in the collection and dissemination of real time data from people.
We neither think nor program in letters; we think and program in words. Thus, today’s CPaaS offers will be as important as letters, but just like letters, will always be subservient to the words they form.
