Twilio recognized as a Leader in the new 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Communications Platform as a Service

Twilio recognized as a Leader in the new 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Communications Platform as a Service

Twilio is pleased to announce that it has been recognized as a Leader in the first-ever 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Communications Platform as a Service. We believe this recognition reflects its strong showing across the board.

The reviews are in, and they highlight Twilio's strengths. We hope you’ll join us in recognizing Twilio's stride forward in the world of cloud-based communications platforms. 🎉🚀

But first, let’s see how we got here.

How CPaaS has matured

Of course, as we’ve heard before, context is royalty and without understanding the evolution of CPaaS, it’s difficult to understand and fully appreciate the evolution of the category and what it means to both business leaders and the developers who implement the technology. Let’s take a quick walk down memory lane.

The story of the evolution of CPaaS is a story of technological innovation meeting the demands of modern communication. The advent of the internet gave birth to email and instant messaging, but these tools were still siloed. With the rise of smartphones, the world witnessed a seismic shift as voice calls, texts, and multimedia converged into a single device. This convergence was a turning point, setting the stage for CPaaS. As businesses and individuals alike craved seamless communication experiences, the need for embedding real-time interactions into applications became apparent. Enter CPaaS, a game-changer that harnessed cloud computing's power to deliver APIs and SDKs, empowering developers to effortlessly integrate voice, video, messaging, and more. CPaaS emerged as a bridge between traditional communication modes and the digital era, revolutionizing how we connect and collaborate in a borderless world.

Twilio and the ever-evolving CPaaS industry

Twilio's versatile CPaaS platform spans messaging, voice, video, AI/ML features, security, integrations, and more. With a commitment to global operations, compliance support, scalability, CustomerAI capabilities, and a far-reaching partner network, Twilio plays a pivotal role in helping businesses transcend borders, work efficiently, deliver trusted communications, and connect seamlessly.

Of course, any CPaaS platform won’t do. Modern communication evolves quickly and Twilio exemplifies several factors that set a CPaaS platform apart.

• Enterprise-grade reliability and scalability are the bedrock of any successful venture, ensuring seamless performance even during periods of high demand.
• Unrivaled global connectivity and network quality allow businesses to confidently expand their reach across borders, offering exceptional communication experiences.
• Integration of flexible APIs aligns with future-proofed roadmaps, empowering organizations to adapt swiftly to evolving technology trends while maintaining the fluidity needed for innovation.

As we delve into the ways CPaaS can propel organizations to success, these differentiators will prove to be pivotal in orchestrating a communication strategy that's not just functional but transformative.

CPaaS platforms creates quality data for AI

A CPaaS platform, like Twilio's, plays a crucial role in facilitating the collection of communication data, allowing businesses to truly understand their customers on a granular level. Twilio’s CustomerAI technology takes this understanding to the next level by coupling the power of large language models (LLMs) with real-time customer data flowing through Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform. This dynamic fusion helps companies seamlessly connect the dots across the customer lifecycle, enabling them to unlock the potential of their customers and provide deeper value through predictive artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

Through various communication channels, businesses gain insights into each individual customer – their communication preferences, product preferences, engagement patterns, and sentiment. This dataset, augmented with information such as message sentiment, call durations, and user behavior, will become a pivotal resource in our future offerings, enabling enhanced personalization and AI capabilities. Twilio's CPaaS platform goes beyond data collection, seamlessly extracting and integrating this wealth of information into AI systems.

A prime example of Twilio’s CustomerAI technology is the Perception Engine, a cutting-edge product unveiled at SIGNAL 2023. Powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), the Perception Engine leverages natural language understanding to extract pertinent customer information from chat conversations, text messages, and call transcripts. What sets it apart is its ability to understand context without relying on predefined structures or custom model training.

Take, for instance, the challenge of extracting shipping addresses from scattered mentions of cities or zip codes across messages. While conventional methods require predefined sentence structures and often result in missed responses, the CustomerAI Perception Engine, soon to be released for messaging, excels in extracting data, even when it spans multiple messages or a conversation's course. This showcases the CPaaS solution's remarkable ability to enrich AI systems with nuanced insights from real-world interactions.

Twilio is not just transforming communication; it’s revolutionizing customer experiences. Twilio’s CustomerAI will be seamlessly integrated into customer touch points across marketing, sales, and service. With Twilio Segment's customer data platform (CDP) capturing, analyzing, and acting on real-time customer signals, generative and predictive AI elevate campaign ideation and execution, leading to bespoke experiences.

How Twilio is fighting fraud and championing compliance

Features like Verify Fraud Guard, built into Twilio’s CPaaS solution, play a pivotal role in effectively managing communication fraud. By closely monitoring both historical and ongoing SMS traffic, Verify Fraud Guard identifies unusual patterns that might indicate non-human behavior or fraudulent activities. With Fraud Guard enabled, when such anomalies are detected, the platform automatically takes action, blocking the destination prefixes associated with suspicious activity, thereby preventing SMS-related fraud.

Twilio's Verify SMS Fraud Insights Dashboard complements this effort by providing comprehensive conversion data and cost savings information for identified and blocked traffic. Businesses gain detailed insights into their communication traffic, enabling them to make informed decisions about their communication strategies. Verify Fraud Guard is just one way Twilio is protecting businesses and their customers.

Another way Twilio is helping fight spam and fraud is by taking a strong stance on compliance. For example, Twilio supports U.S. mobile carriers in requiring that all A2P 10-digit-long-code (10DLC) numbers are registered. A majority of our customers are now registered, and we are slated to operate within a verified ecosystem by the end of September, 2023. This ongoing effort will help preserve SMS as a customer engagement channel for years to come.

How CPaaS powers omnichannel customer experiences

Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform combines customer communications with data, unlocking personalized omnichannel experiences. Acting as the conduit for real-time data reception, the communications platform empowers businesses to glean invaluable insights from customer interactions, which can then be seamlessly channeled through Twilio Engage, the driving engine of hyper-personalized campaigns. Engage leverages Twilio Segment’s CDP, and synthesizes this interaction data into an accessible UI. This UI fuels marketers' creative endeavors, allowing them to craft campaigns that resonate deeply with each customer's unique journey. By leveraging the dynamic capabilities of the communications platform to receive data and Twilio Engage as the orchestral engine to deliver these campaigns through diverse communication channels, businesses embark on a transformative path towards meaningful engagement and impactful customer experiences.

The future is bright

We believe that recognition in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Communications Platform as a Service is a testament to Twilio's dedication to excellence, and we invite you to explore the report to learn why Twilio was recognized. The future shines bright with boundless opportunities for businesses to harness these capabilities and embrace a world of enhanced communication possibilities.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Communications Platform as a Service, Lisa Unden-Farboud, Ajit Patankar, Brian Doherty, DanielO’Connell, September 18, 2023.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.