Analysis : Twilio announces OpenVBX

Disclosure: I am not financially connected to Twilio, but have conversations often with their principals, have written a book with their CTO and had more than one deep conversation with their CEO.   I’m a fan of what they are doing, and wish them the best of luck. This post is as objective as I can be about the topic.

Twilio announced their OpenVBX today, an open source Google Voice for business.  Open VBX is a “modern, flexible business phone” platform, released as open source and works out of the box on top of the Twilio API. You can get the source yourself here,  deploy it on any LAMP platform (PHP 5+), and off you go.  From a cursory glance, OpenVBX is a visual application that allows you to visually design call flows and integrate them into a business process (sort of reminiscent of Voxeo’s Prophecy Designer from a few years back.) They’ve got a pretty good video introduction you might want to watch.

My first question: what’s the strategy around this? I’ve got a few ideas:

• Could this be the first glimmer of what Asterisk would have been if it was designed to be cloud based?  If the success of Asterisk is a metric, then OpenVBX might be what the next generation of open source telephony hackers use to deliver PBXs to businesses.
• I find it interesting that Twilio is dominating the cool-fringe of telephony, yet invests time and money into an application area that is not cool, and not fringe. (To be clear, it’s as cool as a PBX can be.) Selling the sizzle and delivering the steak?
• I’ve been worried about the API based telephony ecosystem for a while now, and I wonder if this is business evidence that the thousands of cool API based apps are making great money for the app developers, but not so much money for the API providers like Twilio.  If OpenVBX has a wide market adoption, it will drive much more voice traffic than most Telco 2.0 applications I’ve seen.  Twilio makes money on the minutes, the numbers and the text messaging. The more of that, the better.
• I hope the folks at places like Avaya catch that Twilio just open sourced this, and the implications for their business. Ouch.

From a competitive perspective, what does this move mean?

• There’s really no other way to put this, but Digium? You fucked up. This could have (should have) been you. Asterisk has officially jumped the shark.
• Voxeo has the most to lose here, as Twilio is clearly challenging them for the hearts and minds of the Web development crowd.  How are you going to get them back?
• IfByPhone is still safe… for now. I say be careful in the future, as Jeff and crew is showing just a little business savvy to go along with their impressive tech credentials. To date, IfByPhone is winning on business smarts backed by decent enough technology.
• Google has nothing to worry about, actually.  Even though this is positioned as Google Voice for business, I see the two projects having very different goals, and I won’t be surprised to see these feature sets diverge quickly.
• Everyone else – you better get your butt in gear and partner with Twilio, ship something competitive very soon, or go home.

To the Twilio team, love++.

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