The purpose of this CXTech Week 19 2020 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech? The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.
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Twilio and Bandwidth’s Results Look Good for the First Quarter
Twilio jumped 20% on its results:
- First quarter revenue growth of 57% Y/Y.
- Active customer accounts grew 23% Y/Y to $190K.
- For Q2, the company sees revenue of $365-370M (consensus: $323.4M), loss per share of $0.08 to $0.11 (consensus: $0.14 loss), and $15-20M loss from operations.
- Due to the coronavirus pandemic, Twilio withdraws its FY20 outlook.
In the model I presented on the CXTech Landscape at TADSummit Asia, I reduced their growth in H2 2020, and H1 2021. But these results are surprisingly healthy, I may need to be less conservative. I think withdrawing FY20 guidance makes sense. But it is comforting to see Q2 being above consensus estimates.
I didn’t expect to see WFH having as much positive impact on Twilio’s results, rather travel, hospitality, and ride-sharing (all usage based) would be affecting results more negatively. The collaboration vendors I expected to gain more from WFH given the subscription revenues, though profitability may be impacted given all the free services being offered.
Here are the slides from the earnings call. I know they are hiring aggressively across Asia at the moment, so next year we’ll likely see international making up more of the growth. I remain impressed how much of the US market they won, given CPaaS is not a winner takes all market.
Bandwidth showed good results. Zoom uses them in the US, so they gained thanks to WFH. Shares of Bandwidth rose nearly 10% after the company reported first-quarter revenue growth of 29% y/y, accelerating more than ten points quarter-over-quarter from Q4. Total revenue was $68.5 million, $4.8 million above the high end of their guidance.
Sinch buys SAP Digital Interconnect for $250M
SDI has 1,500+ enterprise customers and 500 mobile operators as customers, spanning 190 countries. Its offer is more than SMS aggregation, but focusing in on that bit. How did SAP end up with an SMS aggregator with duopoly control over the US SMS market? SAP bought Sybase in 2010, and Sybase bought Mobile 365 in 2006 for $425M, which was a merger (1999) of InphoMatch, interoperable data and messaging services for mobile operators, and Mobileway, messaging solutions for brands and content providers. It was always a little incongruous that SAP would run such as business.
The US operators didn’t want to dirty their hands dealing the premium SMS providers (porn, games and scams), so Mobile 365 sat in the middle and did their dirty work, along with Syniverse. I wrote in 2017 how tyntec was trying to break into the duopoly with its Iris Wireless acquisition. Maybe tyntec will have another go as Sinch’s lawyer bench is not as deep as SAP’s. Perhaps Sinch will remove the issue and buy tyntec?
Sinch impresses me with the number of acquisitions it makes, it recently bought Wavy, as mentioned in the CXTech Week 14 newsletter. But SDI is going to be much harder to integrate as its a carve-out of a legacy (20+ year old) business. Let’s see what happens.
Infobip catches up with the Business Messaging crowd with Conversations
Infobip is a Croatian success story, launched in 2006 its built up a significant A2P business. With the launch of Conversations it catches up with many of the Business Messaging companies offering omni channel message management for call centers.
Reporting on the first week of TADSummit Asia 2020
Through the month of May we’re running TADSummit Asia, focused on thought leadership in programmable telecoms. What differentiates us is a no BS policy, and a focus on the smaller companies changing the telecoms / communications business.
Below are the presentations given so far. Thanks to Sangoma, TeleSign, Asterisk and VoIP Innovations / Apidaze for making TADSummit Asia possible. In Sangoma’s welcome you’ll see Jim Machi wearing a cowboy hat – that was a first for me! As he lives in Texas, I guess he’s gone local 😉 I breakdown the CPaaS, UCaaS and CCaaS revenues by region (where revenue is earned and where company is HQed) and company size. This shows the CXTech revenue gap Asia is facing, and the importance of open source telecom software to Asia in closing that gap.
There’s a great presentation from Abhijeet Singh of TeleSign on Digital Identity For Seamless Onboarding in EMEA and APAC. I interview some programmable communications innovators, Ruwan Dissanayaka of Extrogene and Devadas Krishnan of MySchoolPage. Some great insights in those interviews on how to be successful in CXTech. There also an interesting presentation from Megaport on Network as a Service.
We have a packed schedule through the month, next week we’ll hear from open source projects Kamailio and OpenSIPS; and my review of the open source telecom landscape. This is fresh original content. The week after next I’ll be giving a status review of WebRTC, time traveling between 2013 (when I ran a WebRTC workshop) and today. Reviewing 6 approaches to using WebRTC based on recommendations I’ve given to many businesses across Asia.
Welcome to TADSummit Asia 2020
Sangoma Keynote: Welcome from Jim Machi and the Sangoma Product Stack
CXTech Landscape Across Asia by Alan Quayle
TeleSign TeleTalk: Digital Identity For Seamless Onboarding in EMEA and APAC by Abhijeet Singh
A Brief Introduction to Network as a Service and Megaport
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Congratulations to Brian McManus, who is now Analyst Relations, Financial Services Lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Tien Nguyen Khac is now a Software Engineer at Plexure. Tien has won at TADHack Global several times.
Yves Christol is now VP Product Solutions, Planning & Quality at HTC in Taiwan. He has worked across devices and the labs at Orange for many years.
Preston Gilmer is now Director of Product Development Life Cycle at Change Healthcare. I’ve known Preston since 2006 when he worked for Sigma Systems.
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