According to IDC, the global communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) market is expected to grow from $4.26 billion in 2019 to $17.71 billion by 2024. Communications PaaS leader Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) has been expanding its focus beyond communication to customer engagement with its recent acquisitions.

Twilio’s Financials

Twilio’s second-quarter revenues grew a massive 67% to $668.9 million, including $46.6 million from Twilio Segment, an acquisition that it integrated earlier than expected. GAAP loss from operations was $202.3 million. Non-GAAP net loss per share was $0.11. Analysts expected loss of $0.13 on revenue of $598.4 million.

Among key metrics, its active customer accounts grew 20% to 240,000. The company ended the quarter with 6,334 employees. Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate, which is calculated using total revenue, was 135% compared to 132% a year ago.

Twilio expects to end the third quarter with revenues of $670-$680 million or 50% to 52% growth and non-GAAP loss per share of $0.17-$0.14. The forecast includes revenue from the recently launched Twilio Segment. The Street forecast loss of $0.07 per share on revenue of $636.4 million.

Twilio’s PaaS Ecosystem

At the end of Q2, Twilio had nine Global System Integrators (GSI) in its ecosystem and the number of Twilio certified resources in the ecosystem grew 160%. It now has a community of 9.75 million developers.

Twilio has always focused on providing a highly customizable platform that empowers developers to build. Its Developer Relations team held nearly 30,000 sessions with developers to prepare developers for the changes created by US A2P 10DLC. It launched a Relay Developer Conference in North America, showcasing its community of Twilio builders, tech founders and interactive coding experiences, and aiming to customize developer programs and events unique to each region.

Partners play a pivotal role in its ecosystem. It has a brand new partner initiative for its contact center
platform, Flex, that will harness the power of its SI and GSI partners to leverage their expertise to build pre-built plugins and specialized solutions. It has been piloting this program with Waterfield Technologies, an SI partner with over 30 years of contact center experience and they’ve just launched the first pre-built solution, Xcelerate, to kick
off this partner initiative.

Twilio’s New Segment Offering

Twilio had acquired customer data platform Segment last year in November for an estimated $3.2 billion. Segment enables both developers and organizations to integrate customer data from every customer touchpoint and every record system, thus empowering marketing and sales and services leaders with meaningful information. The data it collates is analyzed to deliver insights needed to design and build relevant and impactful data-driven customer engagement.

Twilio had planned to offer Segment solutions in 2022 but accelerated its plans based on customer demand. In June, Twilio announced the launch of Journeys, a new product built on the Segment customer data platform that allows marketers to easily build sophisticated customer journeys and orchestrate personalization at scale, through every channel, and across 300+ applications with just a few clicks. This delivers a consistent experience across all channels that evolves based on a customer’s actions, preferences, and feedback.

Among other new offerings, Twilio recently launched Twilio Live, a cloud-based platform that enables businesses to deliver live and interactive audio and video experiences that custom-fit their unique brand and community needs. These live interaction use cases are the next frontier of video, making it easier for companies to adopt this as a new
method of engagement across a range of applications. Twilio Live provides low latency at scale and the backing of Twilio’s reliable and secure infrastructure, combined with a best-in-class developer experience.

Twilio has an exciting road ahead as its focus turns to customer engagement. This becomes critical as the CPaaS market is heating up with the entry of Microsoft and Amazon with new communications offerings and Cisco with the acquisition of IMImobile.

Its stock is currently trading at $377.08 with a market cap of $66.8 billion. The stock had climbed to a 52-week high of $457.30 in February. It hit a 52-week low of $216.23 in September last year.