Twilio Reports Large Growth at 2020 Investor Day
On October 1, Twilio held its Investor Day for 2020, reporting positive growth across all segments of the organization. Twilio – a cloud-based communications platform – saw 46% year-on-year revenue growth for Q2FY2020, with overall revenue standing at $401 million. This represents an overall growth rate of 60% CAGR since 2017, when Twilio’s revenue stood at $87 million.
The move to remote work due to COVID-19 is expected to continue impacting Twilio’s revenue forecast. The organization is anticipating 30% year-on-year organic revenue growth over the next four years. Indeed, Twilio’s primary CCaaS solution Flex saw 184% revenue growth in the first half of 2020 alone. Moreover, in the context of Twilio’s forecast of the CCaaS market growing from $7 billion in 2020 to $13 billion in 2023, Flex will continue to play a large role in Twilio’s offerings.
Twilio Flex is not necessarily for the enterprise only. Interestingly, Twilio has a fairly distributed customer organization size, with 36% of its base being enterprises (2,000+ employees), 36% being small business (1-100 employees), and 28% being mid-market (101-2,000 employees).
Source: SoftwareReviews Twilio Flex Scorecard. Accessed October 2, 2020.
Our Take
There are two reasons why Twilio’s Flex CCaaS offering has done so well for 2020. First, Flex is a good product. SoftwareReviews’ data identifies Twilio as a market leader in the CCaaS marketspace, with Flex coming third overall and first in product strategy and rate of improvement.
Source: SoftwareReviews CCaaS Data Quadrant. Accessed October 2, 2020.
Second, Flex is benefiting from its significant role in the contact center marketspace’s trend toward the cloud. Before COVID-19, 66% of contact centers were making some move toward using a cloud-based solution; that figure is almost certainly higher now. Cloud-based offerings enable remote agents, scalability, and real-time analytics for optimizing one’s contact center. These features are necessary in a work-from-home context but will remain sticky even after returning to the office becomes viable again. This is especially if the organization is forward-looking enough to onboard AI-driven technologies that overlay CCaaS solutions – 56% of contact centers report to be investigating this very possibility.
Of course, this is not to say that contact centers will be moving to cloud-only modes. Most organizations will use a hybrid model, blending their on-premises infrastructure (such as connection to the PSTN) with cloud-based solutions (such as omnichannel capabilities). Moreover, organizations wary of the public cloud are configuring their own hybrid mix, keeping important data secure in their own data centers, while still enabling access to cloud-based solutions. For those with the necessary means, a private cloud solution may be the best of both worlds.
To discuss which contact center solution is the right architecture for your organization, set up a call with one of our Info-Tech analysts about upcoming research in this area.