Why not? Companies make billions upon billions of dollars every year selling voice service to businesses. Asterisk is still too complicated for most businesses, I have to imagine there is a huge market for easy to use voice apps.
They may not end up selling directly to small businesses, but power things like patio11's reminder service that then in turn are sold to the mom and pops of the world. OpenVBX looks pretty neat too, it's crazy how much businesses usually pay for this sort of thing.
I think Twilio is going to get a few hundred or thousand dollars from me next year (please God, let it be a few thousand). That will pale in comparison to the revenues if they attract a few Fortune 500s to do big critical line-of-business apps through Twilio. (Think like e.g. automated flight status for Delta.)
Thomas and I were talking about this the other day. A lot of potential Twilio apps replace offline processes. Let me repeat that for emphasis: replace offline processes. That puts the potential cost savings at "ginormous".
Good point - that's exactly the type of answer I was hoping to get. I guess I forgot the value in being close to the metal. Twilio's customers aren't necessarily end customers but companies who, themselves, are attempting to make serious money from Twilio's products and will be forking over huge amounts of cash on a regular basis ;-)
I doubt many single customers will require multiple thousands of phone numbers or be using more than 15 million minutes a month (that's 1,500 people on the phone for 8 hours every week day of the month).
OpenVBX is somewhat a direct-to-business play, but they stayed out of the pool by open sourcing it and then by hinting that others are allowed to re-sell it (more minutes for them!). It's really slick though:
I could see a Big Telco scoop them up for tons of money in the near future. All those cushy business lines are going away at a rapid pace, they need to get in on the next big thing. The players are huge, a $100 million buyout would barely even make the company newsletter (case in point, AT&T banked $12.5B last year).
They may not end up selling directly to small businesses, but power things like patio11's reminder service that then in turn are sold to the mom and pops of the world. OpenVBX looks pretty neat too, it's crazy how much businesses usually pay for this sort of thing.