Good partnership for Twilio, but don't forget that most developers are passionate about Twilio because of the perceived distance that it had from AT&T and other carriers.
If you jump into bed with AT&T eventually some of their stink will rub off. But, you have to hope that this works in the flip side too, and Twilio has a positive impact on how AT&T operates.
This is only a reseller partnership anyway, so you have to imagine that the partnership is going to be beneficial for both entities... On the one side Twilio opens up it's services to thousands++ of AT&T businesses and developers, and AT&T have the hopes of getting a piece of the "cloud", which they clearly have lost touch with by charging 10 cent transactions on SMS..
I completely disagree with your comment about perceived distance from ATT.
When I was using Twilio to write a telephony-capable web app, my main motivation was that Twilio made it dead simple to get from zero to phone calls. No sales people, no digging through stale brochure sites, no "fill out this form and someone will call you" enterprise sales process -- just provide a credit card, get an API key, read the docs. They totally empowered me as a developer to jump right into an area which traditionally takes a lot of inside knowledge to navigate.
I've met some Twilio folks before, and I went to their hackathon/startup weekend event a while back -- the sense I get is that they are strong on culture and have solid, core definitions about who they are. I understand the "stink will rub off" concern, and that is definitely something which has happened to other startups, but the Twilio team has earned my trust and I would continue recommending them.
Agree, awesome news for Twilio. Congrats Jeff and team.
Disagree that passion for Twilio comes from distance to traditional telecom. That has not been my personal experience, anyway. Can anyone imagine that Twilio operates in a vacuum without any need for telecom dealings? If anything, Twilio insulates us from interfacing with the big bad telecoms, and allows us peons to benefit from their legwork for a reasonable, predictable, per-transaction fee.
I doubt a blue whale flinches when a krill gives it the finger (proboscis? antennae? whatever appendage krill use as a rude gesture).
Thank you very much - we're pretty stoked about it.
For me at least, I think the passion you see inside Twilio comes from without more than it comes from within. Every damn day we are running into people who are doing meaningful, extraordinary work with the stuff we build.
Hard not to get genuinely excited about that. Glad to hear it shows when you meet us.
If you jump into bed with AT&T eventually some of their stink will rub off. But, you have to hope that this works in the flip side too, and Twilio has a positive impact on how AT&T operates.
This is only a reseller partnership anyway, so you have to imagine that the partnership is going to be beneficial for both entities... On the one side Twilio opens up it's services to thousands++ of AT&T businesses and developers, and AT&T have the hopes of getting a piece of the "cloud", which they clearly have lost touch with by charging 10 cent transactions on SMS..