A year ago, the CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) space seemed settled into comfortable middle-age. Twilio had won the game in terms of “API for sending messages and making calls”. Nexmo had been acquired by Vonage. Tropo by Cisco. Zang by Avaya.
But, it turns out that this was just a pause before the next verse in this tune. Twilio launched an ambitious expansion “up the food chain” with a call center platform in March (which went live this week), invested heavily in IoT (Should that be part of CPaaS?) and continued last week via the massive acquisition of SendGrid, now moving into the email distribution space.
Meanwhile, Nexmo is newly relevant via Vonage’s acquisition of NewVoiceMedia. And we have a new entrant: SignalWire.