Just over a year later, we now have almost 30 developers working full-time on Twilio in some fashion, plus dedicated sales, sales engineering and managed services personnel. We’ve helped our first customers go live on Flex with several more slated to hit production in the next quarter. We’ve created MVPs of possible products or solution add-ons. And we’ve learned a lot in close partnership with Twilio by pushing the capabilities of the Flex platform, bringing our years of customer care and contact center experience into play.
There are a bunch of things I’m hoping to see at Signal (as well as Twilions who have become good friends and who i’m occasionally exasperated with my incessant questions). Here are a few things I’m looking for:
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New options and ideas for deploying and maintaining Flex at scale. This has been one of our biggest pieces of feedback, both from Perficient directly and from customers. Curious to see how Patrick Kolencherry’s DevOps talk plays into this.
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New capabilities in Messaging and how that service interplays with Flex Channels. Twilio has made a lot of strides in this area in the past six months. We’ve been using the Channels API a lot to unlock new channel experiences for customers.
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Lots of SendGrid on the schedule this year. Definitely curious to see where things are headed post-acquisition.
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Always encouraging and inspiring to hear what twilio.org is up to, with their Twilio For Good campaigns
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Auto-Pilot and AI/machine learning/natural language processing topics generally. We’ve been working closely with the AutoPilot team over the past few months. It’s come a long way since last fall from a somewhat theoretical Beta product to something we are actively using with customers. We’re getting lots of interest in bots, AI and self-service from customers, but there is still a lot of uncertainty over what’s possible and what will resonate most with consumers.
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New developer capabilities, including the direction of the Twilio CLI that was recently launched publicly. Also any new options around standardized debugging or alerting across the Flex platform services as a whole.
Of course it’s always fun to hear what other companies are doing with Flex, as well as other Twilio services like iOT, Sync, Identity and so on. The Narrowband stuff that was introduced last year is still something I find fascinating. Living in rural Vermont, I haven’t had much opportunity to play with it yet (I’m looking at you, T-Mobile coverage in Vermont). Although our practice is very much focused on Flex, we are interested in all the Twilio services more broadly and are definitely hearing from companies who are interested in deep Twilio platform more generally. So I’m keeping my eye out for anything interesting being announced, even if it isn’t strictly Flex.
