This is exactly what I am talking about @Todd.

Developers that were coming into the WebRTC arena and choosing a CPaaS vendor, had to understand the full business and pricing model of that CPaaS vendor before they understand how they can serve their customers.
Some times, this was a prohibiting factor for most of the Startup/Developer value proposition / use case and they had to limit their exposure to high prices due to the fact that a meeting with 5 participants was almost 5 times more expensive from a meeting with 2 due to this crazy “published streams” concept of WebRTC tech.

I am not saying that this was not a problem for the CPaaS vendor to solve, but why should the customer (the Developer) need to learn all that and at teh end find out that they should instead abandon the WebRTC meeting space for the safety of a platform integration with Zoom or Webex ?

More context can be given @Tsahi if needed.

That’s a good question Jeff.

I don’t think I have a good example of a pure API player in the market who started out as something else. Carriers tried adding APIs and failed. Cisco tried multiple times, only to end up acquiring Tropo.

Building an API first company is hard. Really hard – you know that better than most. There are multiple reasons why, with the biggest ones being that developers are hard customers to sell to AND that 80% of the work isn’t the code or the API itself but rather the things around it – documentation, samples, developer outreach – and that is often neglected by those that add an API just because they can.

Back to Vonage – before the acquisition of Nexmo – I have no clue. I don’t remember any API initiatives so can’t really say.

After the acquisition – Nexmo had an API which catered for developers. UCaaS APIs are different in nature, as they are geared more towards integrations. Video APIs were just launched at Nexmo. The TokBox acquisition came at a good point in time is it allows Nexmo to leapfrog the whole part of building up the video feature set AND the process of acquiring the first customers. It saved them 2-3 years easily.

Daniel,

As with all companies I talk to, I can say that support is a mixed bag. There are those who are happy with TokBox support and those who aren’t. I’ve seen this across the board with customers of TokBox as well as customers of other CPaaS players.

The fact that there are alternatives on the market is great, as it enables anyone to choose the vendor that fits his needs the most.

Time will tell if 3D audio is enough of a differentiator.

Twilio and TokBox are definitely different than one another and offer different feature sets.

Twilio is already a business that makes above $100M a year, so you could say carriers missed that one – at least for now. The challenge for carriers isn’t lack of technology, but rather the fact that potential customers (=developers) don’t want to be carrier customers.

2. From a strategic standpoint, the question is: how do you make money in this business? Tokbox and Twilio have a commodity approach, with generally similar feature sets.
Remember how Google was not the first search engine to be available, not even the second one, but the seventh one?
Remember how Uber accounted for 14% of Twilio’s revenues in 2016, 9% in 2017, and Twilio acknowledged that “Uber decreased its usage of [its] products throughout 2017”?
This game is far from over. While also price competitive, a more nimble player like http://www.voxeet.com has a more differentiated offering with its 3D audio capability, simple, per-minute pricing and a UX toolkit that accelerates deployments.

The pricing model was horrendous and a source of constant friction. Some customers need cost certainty, other cost efficiency. One of the biggest challenges the CPaaS industry still needs to deal with is the pricing model. Agree that the more you use the more you need to pay, but how that is implemented today is klugy IMO.

Simon,

That’s great. Would be wise to mention it and approach us at some point in the last few months while we were working on our AI in RTC report (https://www.krankygeek.com/research).

Didn’t quite understand how is it directly relevant to the acquisition…

Otter.ai can fill that gap for cloud video collaboration as it already powers transcription for Zoom.us

Learn more: http://aisense.com/zoom