Twilio Offers Single API For Voice And Text Services in 40 Countries

By: Kevin Green  |   October 18th, 2012   |   Business, News

Since launching in 2008, Twilio has offered developers a sophisticated and scalable API, effectively allowing them to make calls over the internet and send text messages using the same unique service. Since then the phone service platform has grown rapidly and Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder of Twilio, claimed at an annual user conference in San Francisco that his firm’s service was now available on six continents.

 

Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis created a company that is giving the world an opportunity to be more connected and have communication links that hadn’t existed before. They are doing this by working diligently at making their API work everywhere in the world. Twilio started off in the United States and Canada in March 2011 and eventually added twenty more countries. The company recently added 20 more countries including Australia, Brazil, Japan and South Africa.

 

The major challeging with the API was that it needed to work properly with all the different phone operators featured in the diverse countries around the world. Lawson stated that the telecom industry is usually “geo-politically bounded”, but Twilio’s endless testing has created a “virtualized global network” which is not boxed in by national boundaries.

 

Twilio has made it a mantra to not just jump into any market, opting to go through some pretty strict testing before making a jump instead. They research the telecommunication industry and the laws to see if their service can meet its own standards in the country. Twilio also makes sure that they have some sort of setup that allows the developers in the new country the support they require to build apps for the platform.

 

Thus far, the company has reached a very large number of users around the world, however ensuring that its quality does not deteriorate moving forward poses a definite challenge. In order to do this the company has stated that they have created a system that will “deliver Global Low Latency (GLL) and quality service through geographically strategic data centers and through the use of intelligent routing.”

 

The GLL program that has been developed in house makes sure that all calls being made are routed through an optimized path. Twilio’s system dynamically determines which of the six data centers in Virginia, California, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Dublin, or Singapore the call will be routed through. This allows calls to be clearer and not have lag and sound quality issues.

 

Twilio’s success can be measured by the fact it has gotten over $33.5 million in funds and currently employs 125 employees in the four short years it has been in business. The firm also has 150,000 app developers working with its API around the world. The team recently started an outbound SMS service in 200 countries including language support for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Russian and many more. Twilio has truly reached a global status and may soon become the dominant cloud based communication API.

 

Source: The Next Web