In a recent No Jitter article on “The Future of Over-the-Top Enterprise Services” I conduct a thought experiment on what would happen if Salesforce.com decided to buy Twilio?

Much is made of the impact of OTT (Over The Top) services such as Skype–applications that run on top of legacy public networks and offer, at reduced or no cost, many of the same services that those networks charge for as part of their core business. Taking South Korea as an example, a popular OTT service is KakaoTalk, which provides free SMS and calling between its users. Within 2 years of launch it had 42 million users, with 20 million users every day, generating 1.3 billion messages. Today it has over 50 million users. This has resulted in a decline in the telecom operators’ SMS revenues of over 10%. In South Korea, OTT has changed the consumer communication landscape.

To date, OTT services have been consumer focused. But what happens when the OTT services focus on the enterprise market? It’s a large market; globally, enterprises will spend $650 billion in 2012 across all telecom services. This doesn’t include enterprise hardware, software and professional services; include that and we’re closer to $1.4 trillion across Information and Communications Technology (ICT). There’s much revenue to be made in disrupting the enterprise ICT market, as all enterprises large and small are seeking ways to lower the cost of what they spend on ICT, while improving performance.

To understand how this lucrative market could be disrupted by an OTT service, we’ll examine a scenario: What happens if Salesforce.com were to buy Twilio and becomes an OTT Enterprise ICT service provider?  Check out this article to see what happens.