The Commoditization of Telephony and Rise of the Telephony API Carriers

Telephony is getting commoditized. It is happening not only by OTT player, but more by telephony API carriers.

Everywhere you go these days you see an API. It is the way of the world. While this is a trend, there's a niche there somewhere – one of providing telephony APIs: instead of offering a closed solution, you offer an API for developers to do whatever they want with it.

The known ones, and probably pioneers in this space are Twilio and Voxeo. But there are others, each with his own unique twist to telephony.

The latest entrant? Bandwidth.com, who just launched their own beta APIs for voice and SMS.

Where are we with WebRTC in this regard? There are about 10 such companies who focus only on telephony APIs and do WebRTC.

• Some have taken it to the all-encompassing area, of voice, video, PSTN connectivity – the works
• Others are pure WebRTC players
• There are those who do mostly video, and have both WebRTC and Flash support
• In some cases, the offer extends to mobile by way of specialized SDKs

What do I make of it?

• Telephony is being commoditized. The telephony API vendors are making it into a feature and enabling others to embed it into their own service
• It makes it easier to develop and deploy voice and video services. Got an idea that requires real time communications? You can focus on that by using a third party API vendor – that's what Wello has done
• If you are into telephony APIs, you should find a really good story to differentiate yourself from the pack

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As we are close to year end, I'll be taking a break from the WebRTC interviews I am doing here; taking the time to collect a few more interesting interviews. The next one up will be from one of the API vendors that use WebRTC. It might give a glimpse at the inner workings and thought processes going on within such companies.