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Comment by kjw | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that Amazon continues to move up the stack. This can't be great for folks like Five9, inContact, Genesys, etc. And it's probably incrementally negative for Zendesk, RingCentral, and Twilio - where some percentage of customer use cases is tied to contact centers.

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Twilio seems to be promoting this on their blog[0], so can we assume it's powered by Twilio services?

[0] https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/03/supercharge-your-amazon-...

Edit: yep

https://investors.twilio.com/news/all-news/press-release-det...

I wonder if AWS will turn to Twilio to replace the SMS capabilities of SNS which are aging and limited with respect to modern features such as emojis and long messages.

Twilio did a presentation at re:Invent last year talking about how they power AWS SMS messages.

I had they're one of the providers but I've also heard, from a smaller Twilio competitor at a conference, that AWS utilizes several SMS providers, which might make sense regarding the extra limitations.

It is

While Twilio and Amazon Connect have some integrations it does not appear that Connect is built on top of Twilio. The Amazon FAQs says that all telephony services are charged separately by "AMCS LLC" which I'm guessing is a telco they've set up to do this at the lowest possible margins. If they went through someone else their pricing would be higher.

Twilio entered into an agreement with Amazon to power their telephony services. I wouldn't be surprised if this was built in collaboration as they'd benefit from the volume.

http://www.businessinsider.com/twilio-amazon-web-services-pa...

Twilio has been using many AWS services since inception. Many of Twilio's early team members, including Jeff Lawson came from Amazon/AWS. It was while at Amazon watching AWS's explosive growth that Jeff had the lightbulb to offer cloud telephony services.

It is in fact built on twilio: https://investors.twilio.com/news/all-news/press-release-det...

I've been watching $TWLO as I think their stock is undervalued. They do have some risk in terms of a few customers that make up the majority of their revenue (see $FB). Anybody know how big of a deal/partnership this is? Terms?

twilio isn't going anywhere. Its not worth amazon's time. You're talking lots of integrations with legacy ISPs which takes time, and not profitable / revenue heavy enough for Amazon's time.

Twilio were on the stage during the AWS Re:Invent keynote last year.

As I commented above, Amazon Connect is waaaay too rudimentary for any real contact center environment to consider as part of their core operations.

The feature disparity is obvious to anyone that has extensive knowledge and experience in this space.

Check out analysis here: http://blog.fenero.com/amazon-connect-is-not-only-over-price...

Also, their market share is being eroded from the bottom, as nowadays Asterisk-based call-centers are ubiquitous. You just need an Asterisk ISO (or appliance) and some additional software for statistics and agent interactions - like https://www.queuemetrics-live.com/ - and you can run a 50-agent inbound/outbound system in minutes. So much of what used to be a captive market for big PBX makers is now gone. And the numbers we see are very significant.

Genesys just bought Interactive Intelligence, whose cloud-only PureCloud contact center offering competes directly with this.

If you are a business then Amazon wants to be your IT department.

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