Plivo Targets Big Enterprises With 'Bring Your Own Carrier' Cloud Telephony

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/08/14/plivo-targets-big-enterprises-with-bring-your-own-carrier-cloud-telephony/

by bevenky • 13 years ago

38 29 13 years ago

forbes.com

caissy• 13 years ago

That is a really good news! I have been using Twilio for a client of mine offering callback numbers for one of their product. I found out about Plivo last March at PyCon in the expo hall, and their price where 50 to 100% cheaper, while providing what I considered a similar service. We deployed with Twilio, but our next milestone includes switching to Plivo. Best of luck to them!

bevenky7• 13 years ago

Thanks :)

badclient2• 13 years ago

Hopefully the folks at Twilio are following this thread.

For all the awesome things about Twilio, its pricing at serious volume is very shitty. I was recently talking to a start-up that makes apps for call centers. He blamed the super high price relative to their competitor on Twilio's pricing. The start-up's competitor uses Plivo.

May be Twilio believes they can survive without taking part in price wars. We'll see.

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

That'd be a welcome change in telephony.

Price Wars are inevitably unsustainable, I want to see Twilio deliver on quality.

sologoub3• 13 years ago

Familiar situation, but in the longer run, the minute pricing from resellers is less important. What Plivo is doing here is very smart - they are leaving the lower margin pricing games to carriers and focusing on the true value-add, which is the business logic stack.

Twilio is following these moves too with their SIP-out product. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the support receiving SIP calls and registering endpoints.

For smaller customers that do not have the buying power necessary to secure proper redundancy, both Plivo and Twilio offer minutes. Plivo's emphasis on more advanced telephony management is definitely a good differentiation from Twilio, who is focusing more on customers that don't know much about telco.

Remember, if you are routing 10s of millions of minutes, you likely have at least a few people focused on supporting it and revenues to underwrite carrier relationships.

joshcrowder• 13 years ago

Great news - Plivo is awesome my company is currently working on a VOIP system these guys are powering us. The call quality is fantastic compared to Twilo

bevenky7• 13 years ago

Good to hear feedback from customers!

aioprisan4• 13 years ago

I wish there was something like openvbx.com for Plivo, or better yet, a carrier agnostic telephony client platform that could showcase the full functionality of the platform.

bevenky7• 13 years ago

Thanks for your input. Are you looking at a PBX sought of use case?

aioprisan4• 13 years ago

Yes. I built something on top of OpenVBX a while back: https://github.com/andreioprisan/igroups I wish there was a universal web-based VBX that would work with a number of providers, either self-hosted or hosted by the platform provider themselves.

ad936112• 13 years ago

Here is a story from using the Plivo APIs, that convinced me that these guys are for enterprises and serious businesses.

We were looking at different telephony APIs to build a highly concurrent calling system. With Twilio, we could only send one phone number in a single http call. That was a bummer. With Plivo, we could send as many phone numbers as a http POST can handle, and let their APIs handle the high number of calls per second. We were pleasantly surprised that they do so much of the heavy lifting.

josh26003• 13 years ago

When you say high number of calls per second, what are you referring to...

There are people in our industry that think high is 30 and there are people who think high is 10000. Can you give an order of magnitude?

ad936112• 13 years ago

We are currently testing with 50 calls per second(cps) and Plivo just eats it up! We'll crank it up more later this month. I don't know what is the max cps Plivo can handle though.

Zapbbx• 13 years ago

Plivo makes it much easier to build out a telephony app without having to worry about the phone system complexity!

I was able to finish a high-volume, robust solution in less than a month thanks to Plivo's APIs!

bevenky7• 13 years ago

Followup to this post with some more details on our blog:

http://plivo.com/blog/plivo-launches-bring-your-own-carrier/

josh26003• 13 years ago

Plivo is cool, they iterate fast and they're doing some serious stuff in the industry.

Respect from a fellow telecom geek :).

Quick question for Be: do you guys support IP auth or User/Pass auth or both?

bevenky7• 13 years ago

Thanks Josh. We support IP based auth for now.

MichaelGG• 13 years ago

There's a need for us carrier types to agree on a single-packet auth model. Basically, a way for both sides to agree on an an acceptable nonce, so HTTP Digest can be used without having to get a new nonce from the server.

Plivo Targets Big Enterprises With 'Bring Your Own Carrier' Cloud Telephony

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