I’m back in Virginia from San Francisco, where I attended last week’s Twilio Conference. This two day event was a showcase for the up-and-coming developer and entrepreneur community budding around Twilio’s “telephony in the cloud” platform. Based on a Web Services model, Twilio allows companies and developers to build rich telephony and SMS applications using simple APIs, without having to worry about managing a direct connection to service providers.

It was great to see real world applications of the technology, from startups to established companies. The Twilio Fund portion of the conference allowed attendees to experience how technology entrepreneurs are using Twilio as the foundation of brand-new businesses. TalkDesk is a cloud based call center application, where agents can answer calls directly from their web browsers and see information on the callers on screen. Remind101 is a service for sending group text messages without having to share cell phone numbers. Other great ideas were abound.

During the keynotes, we saw some examples of how established companies are using Twilio to enhance their existing offerings. Zendesk now has the ability to integrate phone support into their support ticket management system with Zendesk Voice. Trulia uses Twilio to instantly connect real estate buyers to their affiliated agents with their Instant Leads system. Twilio may provide a platform to help companies add a voice or SMS channel where there was none previously, or to enhance or control existing business processes that already involve the telephone.

The other takeaway from the conference was in meeting the Twilio Team themselves. CEO Jeff Lawson was accessible throughout and even coded some PHP live on stage for the keynote. The rest of the team of “Twilions” were passionate and knowledgeable as well. Twilio is a technology that we are excited about at Vision Point Systems. I know it’s going to present some new options for companies who are looking to offer rich voice applications to their customers.

Author

Jim Schweitzer

I am the Senior Vice President for Vision Point Systems, Inc., and lead strategic technology platform partnerships that are the key to Vision Point Systems’ solutions for our customers. Key partnerships include Appian, Twilio, and Salesforce. I am also focused on developing defined offerings in each channel and enhancing VPS’ identity in each market that we serve.

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