Plivo Targets Big Enterprises With 'Bring Your Own Carrier' Cloud Telephony
forbes.com
forbes.com
For all the awesome things about Twilio, its pricing at serious volume is very shitty. I was recently talking to a start-up that makes apps for call centers. He blamed the super high price relative to their competitor on Twilio's pricing. The start-up's competitor uses Plivo.
May be Twilio believes they can survive without taking part in price wars. We'll see.
Price Wars are inevitably unsustainable, I want to see Twilio deliver on quality.
Twilio is following these moves too with their SIP-out product. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the support receiving SIP calls and registering endpoints.
For smaller customers that do not have the buying power necessary to secure proper redundancy, both Plivo and Twilio offer minutes. Plivo's emphasis on more advanced telephony management is definitely a good differentiation from Twilio, who is focusing more on customers that don't know much about telco.
Remember, if you are routing 10s of millions of minutes, you likely have at least a few people focused on supporting it and revenues to underwrite carrier relationships.
Twilio, Plivo, Tropo/Voxeo, etc. are reselling minutes at a given rate that are aggregated from a basket of carriers. You get a "blended" rate based on their ability to optimize the routes (least cost routing or LCR), carrier quality/redundancy needs, and margin the reseller is trying to make.
For smaller companies, individuals, these blended rates is absolutely the way to go - less complexity, less variability in expenses based on traffic, fewer things to screw up.
For a larger company that already has the carrier relationships and staff to manage them, these reseller models become prohibitively expensive.
If you come to an IT Director managing telco for a large company and tell him/her that it will be $0.02 per minute in 60 second increments (Twilio's list rate) to make outbound calls, you will get laughed out of the room.
Of course, Twilio, Plivo and others offer volume rates, but they still need to make margin. If you are big enough to have direct relationships and/or buying multiple services from carriers (such as minutes and bandwidth), you get better rates.
Plivo is therefore very smart in going for infrastructure play. Twilio is also doing this with their SIP offering, but at a somewhat different angle.
Let me know if you'd like to talk offline.
OK. I think I understand that. Thanks!
http://plivo.com/blog/plivo-launches-bring-your-own-carrier/
We were looking at different telephony APIs to build a highly concurrent calling system. With Twilio, we could only send one phone number in a single http call. That was a bummer. With Plivo, we could send as many phone numbers as a http POST can handle, and let their APIs handle the high number of calls per second. We were pleasantly surprised that they do so much of the heavy lifting.
There are people in our industry that think high is 30 and there are people who think high is 10000. Can you give an order of magnitude?
Thanks for sharing :).
I was able to finish a high-volume, robust solution in less than a month thanks to Plivo's APIs!
Respect from a fellow telecom geek :).
Quick question for Be: do you guys support IP auth or User/Pass auth or both?