According to a recent year, the global unified communication as a service (UCaaS) market is expected to grow 13% annually from $28.96 billion in 2021 to $69.93 billion in 2028. The growth in the industry is driven by the continuing adoption of remote working conditions globally and improved API-driven capabilities. Communications PaaS player Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) recently reported its first break-even quarter.

Twilio’s Financials

For the first quarter, Twilio’s revenues grew an impressive 48% to $875.4 million, surging ahead of the market’s forecast of $861.6 million. EPS was $0.00 per share, shattering the market’s expectations of a loss of $0.23 per share.

Among key metrics, its active customer accounts grew by 33,000 to 268,000. The company ended the quarter with 8,199 employees. Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate, which is calculated using total revenue, was 127% for the quarter compared to 133% a year ago.

Twilio expects to end the second quarter with revenues of $912-$922 million and a loss of $0.23-$0.20 per share, which was significantly ahead of the Street’s forecast of a loss of $0.21 per share on revenues of $920.08 million.

Twilio’s Growth from Segment Acquisition

Twilio continues to benefit from its Customer Data Platform (CDP) offering added through its acquisition of Segment. Analysts believe that Twilio is able to offer a differentiated value proposition to help customers transform and optimize B2C communication through its CDP offering. They expect more traction with Segment later in the year.

Twilio reported organic growth of 35% in the quarter, growing 100 bps over the previous quarter, and ahead of the market’s expectations of 30%. Segment is part of organic revenue growth for Twilio.

According to a recent report, the global CDP market is expected to grow at a CAGR 25% over the next few years to reach $6.94 billion by 2029 from $1.42 billion in 2022. The significant growth in CDP demand is driven by the overall customer dissatisfaction with CRM solutions that organizations have. Traditional CRM solutions are prone to requiring significant manual intervention leading to overall dissatisfaction in how they handle customer data. Additionally, as brands accelerate their digital transformation journeys to improve customer experience, they are pushing for CDP solutions. The CDP market is a crowded one with solutions offered by tech giants like Adobe, Salesforce, Zoho, and Zendesk. Adobe is the leading CDP vendor due to the breadth of its platform. But analysts believe that Segment is in a strong competitive position primarily because it is able to integrate well with Twilio’s digital channels to create a singular platform that can deliver both omnichannel campaigns and greater personalized customer engagement at scale.

Its stock is currently trading at $110.71 with a market cap of $20.1 billion. The stock had climbed to a 52-week high of $412.68 in July last year. It fell to a 52-week low of $87.67 last week.