Contents Overview ........................................................................................................................................................... 3 How the Pandemic Changes CPaaS Priorities? .......................................................................................... 4 CPaaS features map ......................................................................................................................................... 5 The pandemic and CPaaS vendors ................................................................................................................ 6 The pandemic will pass, but digital transformation won’t ........................................................................ 9 3 pillars of CPaaS competition and differentiation in 2021 ................................................................... 10 Machine Learning in media quality ............................................................................................................. 11 Video, Video, Video ......................................................................................................................................... 12 Diagnostics and analytics ............................................................................................................................. 13 Didn’t you miss anything? ............................................................................................................................. 13 Cloud Vendors Are Changing the CPaaS Landscape ............................................................................... 15 Why now? ......................................................................................................................................................... 17 Amazon Chime SDK ....................................................................................................................................... 17 Azure Communication Services (AKA ACS) .............................................................................................. 19 The new model for Video CPaaS? ............................................................................................................... 20 Why telephony is dying and communication is growing ........................................................................ 21 Winners............................................................................................................................................................. 21 Losers ............................................................................................................................................................... 22 Twilio Signal And The Future Of CPaaS ..................................................................................................... 25 Twilio Signal - past events ............................................................................................................................ 26 Twilio By the Numbers .................................................................................................................................. 27 Nike and digital transformation ................................................................................................................... 28 Twilio Microvisor ............................................................................................................................................ 29 Twilio Video WebRTC Go .............................................................................................................................. 31 Twilio Flex ecosystem ................................................................................................................................... 33 Twilio Frontline................................................................................................................................................ 34 Other announcements ................................................................................................................................... 36 Machine Learning was missing ................................................................................................................... 37 The coming CPaaS fight is in the enterprise ............................................................................................. 38 Choosing a WebRTC API Platform ............................................................................................................. 39 About the author ........................................................................................................................................... 40 CPaaS in 2020 - A market in transition Pg. 2 Overview The year 2020 brought with it a transition in how we view and consume digital communications. A lot of the change can be directly attributed to the pandemic. With over a billion people now indoctrinated in how to conduct video calling and use it in many aspects of life, the old ways are not coming back. This ebook offers a glimpse of the changes we are heading to in the domain of CPaaS - Communication Platform as a Service, trying to analyze how the vendors in this market are going to operate moving forward. Each chapter is an article published on my bloggeek.me website during the months of September/ October 2020, covering a different aspect of this transition. The first chapter maps the offerings of CPaaS vendors and outlines the change in their focus areas moving forward. The second chapter deals with the entrance of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure into this domain and how this will change the CPaaS market landscape. The third chapter looks at the Twilio Signal event, analyzing the announcements made in that event. In past years, Twilio set the tone and path for the whole market. 2020 might be a different case. CPaaS in 2020 - A market in transition Pg. 3 How the Pandemic Changes CPaaS Priorities? CPaaS in 2020 - A market in transition Pg. 4 The pandemic is changing everything. CPaaS providers need to change their priorities and focus as well. The pandemic is an epochal event. It caught the CPaaS industry somewhat ready, with gaps found in their video offerings. Behind the pandemic, a few other market changes are taking shape, affecting how CPaaS providers need to plan ahead. I’d like to look at a few of these trends and outline what I see as the basis of CPaaS competition for the future. CPaaS features map CPaaS marketecture and features map The diagram above shows the CPaaS features map. It is a kind of a marketecture diagram of the various bits and pieces that make up CPaaS. CPaaS in 2020 - A market in transition Pg. 5 I’ve layered it from Infrastructure, through Communications Building Blocks and Higher Abstraction to the Simplified Runtime domain. While not all CPaaS vendors will fill all building blocks in this map, they all see it in front of them one way or another. Here are a few things to note: I’ve decided not to place Email or IoT in here though I could without much effort The importance of each block will be different for different customers and will change over time. The pandemic certainly changed priorities shifting them towards Video for example I am using the term Studio, though Flow is the one that is used by most of Twilio’s competitors ML stands for Machine Learning and it has its place throughout the CPaaS product stack. More on that later If I had to map priorities for 2021, I’d probably create this heatmap: CPaaS areas of investment in 2020-2021 The pandemic and CPaaS vendors In many ways, the pandemic is accelerating the need for CPaaS providers. The world switched en masse from one of physical interactions to a virtual one. This, in turn, exposed a few aspects in the CPaaS market. Digital transformation fast forward CPaaS in 2020 - A market in transition Pg. 6 The image above circulated on Twitter some time in March-April this year. It is spot on. Digital transformation is here and it is here to stay. It came about a few years faster than expected and to get by, companies are relying more on communications and a lot of it comes today from vendors who use CPaaS or by developing the solutions needed on top of CPaaS platforms. The thing is, in many cases, the increase is also catching businesses off guard, with call centers and support teams being overwhelmed with incidents. And that at a point in time where everyone is forced to work from home - including the call center agents. This in turn, increases the requirements around technologies that assist in automation of processes and communication channels. Call deflection and agent assist solutions are taking center stage. This changes a bit how CPaaS vendors need to treat communication APIs, and especially what these APIs need to enable. Are we looking now for more or less Uber-like solutions of matching a customer to a service provider? Or are we more about getting hold of the interaction’s content in real time and injecting insights into it, with or without a human agent? I don’t have the answers, but I have a feeling that they are different than they were 9 months ago. CPaaS vendors totally missed video Yap. We had CPaaS vendors doing video. A few of them. And they’re just fine. Up until the point that video becomes important for everyone and that totally new use cases pop up in our market on almost a daily basis. Zoom doesn’t mean a magnifying glass anymore. Nor is it talking about getting a closer look. During the pandemic? Daily officially launched. And raised money Dolby.io launched