Twilio Makes Voice Services Available via Private Network

2016 Business Communications: Changing the Way We Work

At the Enterprise Connect 2016 conference today, Twilio announced that IT organizations can now set up a private connection between their local IT environment and instances of its communications software running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Patrick Malatack, vice president of product management for Twilio, says the Twilio Interconnect service, initially available for Twilio voice services, now ensures quality-of-service (QoS) provided voice communications using a dedicated private network based on an MPLS network or via a virtual private network (VPN) using an IPsec connection that does not guarantee QoS. IT organizations can connect their applications running on AWS directly to Twilio services as well.

In the future, Malatack says, Twilio will extend this capability to all its messaging and video communications services.

While IT organizations once struggled to provide all manner of unified communications on top on internal networks, cloud services such as Twilio make it simple to invoke these services via a simple REST application programming interface (API) call. In fact, not only can end users access these services, the REST APIs make it simpler to embed these capabilities within other applications.

Far too many IT organizations have spent years wrestling with all forms of unified communications on their networks. The rise of these services in the cloud provides a much simpler way to invoke the services, while a private network ensures the quality of the user experience.

Naturally, that may not mean that IT organizations are going to rip and replace all the unified communications technologies they have running on premise overnight. But it does mean many of them may want to start planning what they are going to do with all the time they previously allocated to managing those on-premise services.