LAS VEGAS—Twilio has announced a partnership with IBM that brings the power of Twilio’s software and cloud-based communications platform to the IBM platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, code-named BlueMix.
According to the San Francisco-based company, as of Feb. 24, IBM customers can deploy Twilio solutions when building applications in IBM BlueMix.
Indeed, Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson demonstrated the ease at which this is possible by coding a Twilio application onstage during the opening keynote at the IBM Pulse 2014 conference here. In less than five minutes of live coding Node.js, Lawson had a Twilio app up and running on BlueMix in front of more than 10,000 attendees.
From in-application dialing, conference calling, group texting, mobile app distribution, two-factor authentication and more, IBM BlueMix customers can now leverage the Twilio platform to easily integrate the communications solution that meets their business needs.
In an interview with eWEEK, Lawson said Twilio fundamentally changes the way businesses build communication by bringing it into the realm of software and the cloud. Twilio virtualizes a user’s telecommunications infrastructure and makes that infrastructure accessible anywhere in the world via a single, global API.
Twilio enables developers and businesses to rapidly build and deploy communication solutions that meet their specific needs. Whether integrating voice, messaging or voice over IP (VOIP) capabilities into a Web or mobile app, or building complete systems like a call center, Twilio removes the traditional obstacles to creating effective communications experiences. Twilio gives businesses the ability to innovate, prototype, create and connect with their customers.
IBM BlueMix provides an open cloud development platform for developers to build new mobile and cloud apps for the enterprise. Harnessing the power of these two platforms enables developers and businesses to quickly innovate, prototype and connect with their customers at the right time and via the right communications channel.
Steve Robinson, general manager of IBM Cloud Platform Services, said IBM has been impressed by the innovation in both the Twilio platform and in what developers are building with the platform. “The combined power of Twilio and IBM BlueMix provides an opportunity for developers and enterprises to build a new generation of communications into their applications,” he said.
“Businesses of all types and sizes are moving their computing and communications infrastructure to the cloud,” Twilio’s Lawson said in a statement. “The combination of cloud-based infrastructure services along with Twilio’s powerful communications infrastructure is further accelerating this trend. The solution that Twilio is offering with IBM speeds the ability of developers and enterprises to better connect with their customers by providing flexible cloud-based communications. With the innovation possible for developers and businesses today, we can’t wait to see what our customers will build.”
IBM has been working on BlueMix for some time now and has introduced the technology into beta.
BlueMix enables developers to use pre-integrated services and patterns to build applications. It also simplifies and automates tasks across the lifecycle of the application to free up time to write code you want, it helps developers deal with scalability issues, and it is useful in DevOps environments, IBM said.