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RingCentral Wants To Take On Twilio, But Is It Apples With Apples?

This article is more than 9 years old.

Here's an interesting story that looks at two fundamentally different opinions about the way technology will work in the future.

On the one hand, we have Twilio. Twilio is a relatively young, but rapidly growing, vendor of communication-based developer tools. Say you're building a mobile application and you want to allow customers to make phone calls or send SMS messages from the application, you integrate Twilio into your app and it handles the communications part of the process. Twilio is being used by cloud vendors such as Uber and Zendesk to power their communications.

On the other hand, we have RingCentral. RingCentral offers a full business communication solution - essentially we can think of it as a cloud-based telephone system. Everything that your old-fashioned PABX could do, RingCentral offers in the cloud.

What is interesting, however, is that RingCentral is now offering its own developer platform, RingCentral Connect Platform, that it hopes will be attractive to developers. RingCentral believes its approach will deliver far deeper communications functionality than a more modular solution like Twilio will. More than a semantic difference that relates to only one particular part of the technology industry, this is an interesting look at some more general trends that are occurring.

RingCentral's key claim here is that it delivers a far broader offering than Twilio. Via email I spent time looking at RingCentral's justification for this bold claim. SO what does RingCentral have to say for itself? Some questions and answer follow

What is the difference between companies developing with RingCentral and Twilio?

A number of companies provide transport as a platform. That is, they provide APIs to add basic voice and text capabilities to custom applications. RingCentral goes far beyond this. We've now opened APIs to expose our entire industry-leading cloud-based business communications system as an open platform. With RingCentral Connect, developers can now access the power of multi-modal, real-time communications and messaging, supported by our extensive business logic and customer data management and reporting. This enables applications to not only send and receive calls and texts, but deeply embed communication functionality into the business workflow of the application.

Difference in monetization models?

The difference is that Twilio sells by the minute and by the amount of SMS. We sell based on an all inclusive subscription model that includes unlimited calling minutes, unlimited SMS, and unlimited conferencing and video. Check out our subscription pricing tiers here: http://www.ringcentral.com/office/plansandpricing.html

Our platform model is akin to Salesforce.com, which is a subscription model and has APIs that are used by their customers and partners who want to get the most out of the Salesforce experience by integrating directly with their platform. The same is true for RingCentral Connect. It's a way for customers to easily access the wealth of data (e.g., call logs, business rules, messages, presence, etc.) that is already managed by RingCentral, thus enabling much richer and more innovative workflows for their businesses.

Why is RingCentral Connect Platform better for business workflow?

As business tools migrate to SaaS models in the cloud, it’s prompting a change in the way we work. Business communication is still about connecting people, but with many tools now in the cloud, it’s also about being organized around business application systems, including CRM (customer relationship management), HDS (help desk systems), and ERM (enterprise resource managements) to name a few.

To achieve optimal workflow, breaking down the silos between communication and business system applications is critical to eliminating inefficiencies and gaps that block customer success. RingCentral is closing these gaps, and breaking down the silos that isolate communications from business system applications and workflows. This is a significant step forward because businesses want to better connect with customers – and communications is at the heart of every customer interaction. Having communications well integrated into the tools and applications businesses rely on every day is critical to eliminating inefficiencies and gaps that block customer success.

MyPOV

Interesting perspectives indeed, and some of what RingCentral says rings (pun intended) true. But it's important to look at this in context. Pretty much any cloud application these days that is worth its salt have APIs that allow for customization. But creating a customization API is different from being designed from the ground-up as a modular development tool. And this is where Twilio has the edge. The real test is to apply RingCentral's APIs to one of Twilio's case studies - would Uber or Zendesk have been able to build their services on top of RingCentral? If the base functionality doesn't allow them to, no end of value on top makes any difference.

At the end of the day, it comes down to horses for courses. Do you want a communications developer tool or an extensible cloud telephony system - two very different products with different use cases.

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