The telecom industry agrees that the future of 5G and enterprise telco lies in monetizing network APIs. But communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) company Twilio has been eating telco’s lunch by not only capturing messaging revenue, but also dominating enterprise IT departments.
For this episode, I’m sharing my recent TelecomTV talk about how telcos can beat Twilio and take back what’s theirs. I share a three-step plan for regaining a strategic position within enterprise IT departments, and give a sneak peek at a new Totogi CPaaS product that can help.
Click play to hear:
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Set up a meeting with our team to learn how to tap the immense business value it can bring.
Over the last decade, operators have seen their combined Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging market share drop from 80% to 44% as of 2022—and it’s projected to keep shrinking. Analysts forecast a compound annual shrink rate of -1% for operators over the next five years, while Twilio is expected to grow at 7.5% CAGR. That gap is exactly why Danielle Royston sounded the alarm and outlined a plan for telcos to fight back.
Three core challenges put telcos at a disadvantage: they built proprietary APIs that were difficult to install and use, they couldn’t match Twilio’s speed of innovation, and enterprises ultimately gravitated to Twilio’s simpler, more developer-friendly platform. As a result, Twilio captured major enterprise customers, built a following of more than 10 million developers, and cemented its position as the dominant CPaaS player—all while operating on top of telco’s own network infrastructure.
DR’s strategy starts with arming sales teams with Twilio-compatible APIs that developers already know and use. Second, telcos should leverage their owner economics—since Twilio buys wholesale connectivity from operators and marks it up—to undercut Twilio’s ~50% gross margin with competitive enterprise pricing. Third, once developers are in the telco ecosystem, operators can upsell them into higher-value network APIs, building the developer platform that’s critical to the future of enterprise telco. Read more in DR’s blog, Are you jealous of Twilio?
Whoosh! is Totogi’s new CPaaS product—a 100% Twilio-compatible API platform that telcos can offer to enterprise customers as their own product. Enterprises can swap out Twilio APIs with just a single code change, redirecting all API calls from Twilio’s platform onto the telco’s network. Totogi provides the software directly to operators, handles ongoing product investment and developer support, and takes a small revenue share—giving telcos a fast path to market without years of internal development.
Twilio is actively expanding its platform dominance, and DR argues the next 12 months will determine the long-term winner. Building a comparable API platform in-house would take operators two to four years—time they don’t have. Fortunately, Twilio is facing headwinds: it’s unprofitable and under activist investor pressure. That distraction creates a window of opportunity, and Whoosh! is ready to deploy now, giving telcos a chance to strike before Twilio locks up the enterprise platform permanently.
Danielle Royston’s acquisition of Kandy, the UCaaS/CPaaS company with customers like AT&T, e&, and IBM’s Kyndryl, reflects Totogi’s conviction that network APIs are the key to unlocking new enterprise revenue streams for operators. Whoosh! is the product manifestation of that thesis—giving telcos a competitive, developer-ready CPaaS offering built on their own infrastructure. The goal isn’t just to recapture messaging revenue; it’s to position telcos as the platform owners at the center of enterprise IT, before that role belongs to someone else permanently.
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