

Plivo Targets Big Enterprises With 'Bring Your Own Carrier' Cloud Telephony - bevenky
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/08/14/plivo-targets-big-enterprises-with-bring-your-own-carrier-cloud-telephony/

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caissy
That is a really good news! I have been using Twilio for a client of mine
offering callback numbers for one of their product. I found out about Plivo
last March at PyCon in the expo hall, and their price where 50 to 100%
cheaper, while providing what I considered a similar service. We deployed with
Twilio, but our next milestone includes switching to Plivo. Best of luck to
them!

~~~
badclient
Hopefully the folks at Twilio are following this thread.

For all the awesome things about Twilio, its pricing at serious volume is very
shitty. I was recently talking to a start-up that makes apps for call centers.
He blamed the super high price relative to their competitor on Twilio's
pricing. The start-up's competitor uses Plivo.

May be Twilio believes they can survive without taking part in price wars.
We'll see.

~~~
sologoub
Familiar situation, but in the longer run, the minute pricing from resellers
is less important. What Plivo is doing here is very smart - they are leaving
the lower margin pricing games to carriers and focusing on the true value-add,
which is the business logic stack.

Twilio is following these moves too with their SIP-out product. I'm sure it's
only a matter of time before the support receiving SIP calls and registering
endpoints.

For smaller customers that do not have the buying power necessary to secure
proper redundancy, both Plivo and Twilio offer minutes. Plivo's emphasis on
more advanced telephony management is definitely a good differentiation from
Twilio, who is focusing more on customers that don't know much about telco.

Remember, if you are routing 10s of millions of minutes, you likely have at
least a few people focused on supporting it and revenues to underwrite carrier
relationships.

~~~
brandnewlow
Can you explain out what you mean in your first paragraph a bit more? I'm not
sure I follow 100%.

~~~
sologoub
DISCLAIMER: I am not in any way affiliated with Plivo, Twilio or any other
provider.

Twilio, Plivo, Tropo/Voxeo, etc. are reselling minutes at a given rate that
are aggregated from a basket of carriers. You get a "blended" rate based on
their ability to optimize the routes (least cost routing or LCR), carrier
quality/redundancy needs, and margin the reseller is trying to make.

For smaller companies, individuals, these blended rates is absolutely the way
to go - less complexity, less variability in expenses based on traffic, fewer
things to screw up.

For a larger company that already has the carrier relationships and staff to
manage them, these reseller models become prohibitively expensive.

If you come to an IT Director managing telco for a large company and tell
him/her that it will be $0.02 per minute in 60 second increments (Twilio's
list rate) to make outbound calls, you will get laughed out of the room.

Of course, Twilio, Plivo and others offer volume rates, but they still need to
make margin. If you are big enough to have direct relationships and/or buying
multiple services from carriers (such as minutes and bandwidth), you get
better rates.

Plivo is therefore very smart in going for infrastructure play. Twilio is also
doing this with their SIP offering, but at a somewhat different angle.

Let me know if you'd like to talk offline.

~~~
brandnewlow
OK. So the argument, if I might restate it to make sure I follow, is that
Plivo knows the big companies have the relationships and clout to not need the
price abstraction benefits they provide. So Plivo is letting them plug their
own carrier relationships into its software so that they at least control the
telco "business logic" for those companies, even if they're not able to get
their aggregate, steeper price for the minutes themselves.

OK. I think I understand that. Thanks!

~~~
sologoub
Plivo handles all call control, so traffic passes through Plivo.

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bevenky
Followup to this post with some more details on our blog:

[http://plivo.com/blog/plivo-launches-bring-your-own-
carrier/](http://plivo.com/blog/plivo-launches-bring-your-own-carrier/)

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ad93611
Here is a story from using the Plivo APIs, that convinced me that these guys
are for enterprises and serious businesses.

We were looking at different telephony APIs to build a highly concurrent
calling system. With Twilio, we could only send one phone number in a single
http call. That was a bummer. With Plivo, we could send as many phone numbers
as a http POST can handle, and let their APIs handle the high number of calls
per second. We were pleasantly surprised that they do so much of the heavy
lifting.

~~~
josh2600
When you say high number of calls per second, what are you referring to...

There are people in our industry that think high is 30 and there are people
who think high is 10000. Can you give an order of magnitude?

~~~
ad93611
We are currently testing with 50 calls per second(cps) and Plivo just eats it
up! We'll crank it up more later this month. I don't know what is the max cps
Plivo can handle though.

~~~
josh2600
I doubt anyone knows max cps numbers on any platform. It's usually a question
of adding more servers until the software breaks, but there are lots of
strategies. It always comes back to design.

Thanks for sharing :).

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joshcrowder
Great news - Plivo is awesome my company is currently working on a VOIP system
these guys are powering us. The call quality is fantastic compared to Twilo

~~~
bevenky
Good to hear feedback from customers!

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Zapbbx
Plivo makes it much easier to build out a telephony app without having to
worry about the phone system complexity!

I was able to finish a high-volume, robust solution in less than a month
thanks to Plivo's APIs!

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josh2600
Plivo is cool, they iterate fast and they're doing some serious stuff in the
industry.

Respect from a fellow telecom geek :).

Quick question for Be: do you guys support IP auth or User/Pass auth or both?

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bevenky
Thanks Josh. We support IP based auth for now.

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MichaelGG
There's a need for us carrier types to agree on a single-packet auth model.
Basically, a way for both sides to agree on an an acceptable nonce, so HTTP
Digest can be used without having to get a new nonce from the server.

~~~
bevenky
Absolutely. With IPv4 becoming scarce this is surely needed. However, we are
working with select few carriers to see if we can have this done the right
way!

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aioprisan
I wish there was something like openvbx.com for Plivo, or better yet, a
carrier agnostic telephony client platform that could showcase the full
functionality of the platform.

~~~
bevenky
Thanks for your input. Are you looking at a PBX sought of use case?

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aioprisan
Yes. I built something on top of OpenVBX a while back:
[https://github.com/andreioprisan/igroups](https://github.com/andreioprisan/igroups)
I wish there was a universal web-based VBX that would work with a number of
providers, either self-hosted or hosted by the platform provider themselves.

~~~
sunsu
Our system is designed to run on any of the modern cloud telephony APIs:
Twilio, Plivo, TelAPI, even your own RestComm stack. I don't know of anything
OS though.

~~~
aioprisan
Can you elaborate? Are you talking about your own startup product?

