Twilio launches in the UK

US-based cloud communications company Twilio has arrived in the UK with its first customer.

It has launched Twilio Voice, its application for building web and mobile applications that can make and receive telephone calls, with customer support software provider Zendesk as its first major European customer.

The company has also opened its first European office in the Silicon Roundabout area of east London. And it has also launched its first public beta in Poland, France, Portugal, Austria and Denmark, with an additional 11 European countries slated to be added by the end of 2011.

Jeff Lawson, Twilio chief executive and co-founder said international functionality has been among its top requested features from customers since the San Francisco-based telephony infrastructure web service hosted on Amazon Web Services launched almost three years ago.

“Through our powerful APIs [application programming interfaces] we enable developers to build fantastic, innovative products. We estimate there are more than 10 million software developers worldwide, and we look forward to serving a greater number of them than ever before from our European headquarters in London,” he said.

Over 60,000 developers worldwide already use its platform, and it counts eBay, Sony and LinkedIn among its customers.

Twilio developers can buy local UK telephone numbers from the Twilio.com website and use Twilio's API to integrate phone calls, text messages and internet protocol (IP) voice communications into web, mobile and traditional phone applications using their existing unified communications software engineering resources and skills.

Zendesk is using Twilio to launch its own cloud-based call centre service to complement its existing helpdesk products. Zendesk Voice is designed to let users set up cloud-based call centres at a fraction of the cost of traditional set-ups.

Matt Price, vice president and general manager in Europe, Middle East and Africa for Zendesk, said Zendesk Voice allowed customer service organisations to create a cloud-based call centre in minutes.

“Having launched in the US, we are now delighted to announce the public beta of the product in the UK – allowing both existing customers and trial users to try out this great new functionality immediately at no cost,” said Price.

Bern Elliot, Gartner Research vice president and distinguished analyst, told Cloud Pro why Twilio was a recent among the “Cool Vendors” chosen by the analyst firm in enterprise communications and network services for this year.

“Twilio hits the sweet spot in two areas: the first is that the model allows for lower cost of delivery,” he said. “That’s attractive to organisations that want to use its telephony interface to provide a low-cost way of reaching people on a large scale and with a limited budget.

“The other area is that its model allows application developers to start developing and launching applications independently straightaway. There’s a potentially large European developer community that would find it interesting and useful, at the same time as there’s such a large mobile market in Europe.”

He also commented that Twilio was rare, in that its model “was coming at it from a very cloud-centric, platform-as-service-based approach”.