Mobile marketing campaigns are a new avenue for marketers seeking to target and engage customers. This channel has become one of the most powerful consumer touch-points because of its ability to increase customer retention and long-term loyalty through message personalization. Not only can marketers target users based on customer demographic, they can also provide unique product offerings based on location and in-app behavior.

By running mobile campaigns using a marketing automation tool like Agile CRM along with a SMS API provider like Plivo, marketers can build powerful behavior-based SMS campaigns that help engage customers on a contextual level.

To get you started, our friends at Agile CRM have put together documentation to show you how to automate, schedule, and personalize customer SMS sender IDs for SMS campaigns using Plivo and Agile CRM.

Check out the Plivo-Agile CRM SMS Integration.

2014 was a great year for Plivo. We hit profitability in early May and our growth since then has been remarkable. Our voice traffic grew 100%, and our SMS traffic grew a staggering 500%. Our number of paid customers grew 200%, which led to an impressive 250% increase in annual revenues compared to 2013.

In addition to our growth, we also proudly delivered more benefits to our customers, including the launch of international SMS, the launch of SMS short codes in the US, private beta for two-way SMS numbers in 23 countries, and queuing for SMS and voice calls. We also made incoming SMS free in all of our countries and lowered prices for international voice.

Of course, last year wasn’t without its bumps. In March, we experienced a DDoS attack that led to a few hours of downtime. Since then, we’ve invested heavily in security and monitoring. Our growth also meant that our phone number inventory was depleting faster than expected. In October, we improved our inventory automation system and increased our phone number inventory by 400% by the end of 2014. Despite these growing pains, our customers’ businesses have continued to flourish on our infrastructure, and we cannot thank you enough for your trust and support.

We’ve also been keeping busy in the back end to deliver the most reliable global communications backbone in the industry. We can proudly say that we work with Tier 1 carriers in more than 100 countries to give us direct connections to 1,600+ networks around the world. This means that our connections are free from low-cost routing, routing dilution, and blending, so our customers get low latency, improved connectivity, high SMS delivery rates, and clear voice calls.

We’re so serious about delivering great quality of service that we recently built a dedicated team to manage carriers end to end. They continually negotiate for better prices and connections on your behalf with local carriers around the world. They also manage and ensure availability of a large, diverse inventory of mobile, fixed, and toll-free phone numbers in 55 countries and 8,000+ area codes. Our carrier team also specializes in regulatory compliance, helping you adhere to local regulatory and legal requirements in all countries.

Our mission has always been to simplify global telecom and enable access to quality cloud communications at a low cost. We will continue to make our customers our utmost priority, because we couldn’t have done all of this without your support.

Sincerely,
Venky, Co-founder

Three exhilarating years — that’s how long it’s been since we first made our mark in the world of voice and SMS APIs. We’ve come a long way since our inception, confidently striding in the right direction, scaling up our team from four to 30 members, and growing our customer base at an unbelievable rate (by 400% in 2013 alone). What a fantastic journey it’s been!

Thinking back to when Mike and I co-founded the business, I remember all the ups and downs we’ve been through and the important lessons we’ve learned along the way. Here are three that I believe had the greatest impact on our growth and development as a company.

Lesson 1: How we persevered as Y Combinator rejects

Here’s a question: How would you feel after working 36 hours non-stop? Energized? Or cranky? If you still feel alert, eager, and want to keep going, you’re probably pretty darn passionate about what you’re doing and also having a lot of fun doing it. Over the last three years, we’ve lost plenty of sleep, but what we gained in return was invaluable — high-quality products that work smoothly and efficiently, a bunch of loyal customers, and an enviable team of talented people who truly believe in Plivo. We’ve also learned that perseverance pays off.

I remember the unfaltering enthusiasm that drove us when Mike and I first connected on GitHub, and created the Plivo open source framework. At the time we called it Telephonie, using the French spelling, since Mike is originally from France. We wanted a more robust solution to incorporate voice and SMS capabilities into web applications than we could find elsewhere and decided to build it ourselves. The result was technically superior to what existed at that point. The Plivo framework became popular, and people wanted to pay us to develop applications for them. That kickstarted the idea to take Plivo to the next level.

So what does working with passion mean? It means that if you’re fervent about what you do, then challenges along the way will fire you up rather than dampen your spirit. Mike and I learned that very early on. In September 2011, after meeting just once, we started our company, moving from being developers of the Plivo framework to providing voice and SMS APIs for easy integration into applications. At the end of September, in a rush of enthusiasm, we applied for Y Combinator — and we were rejected. Even worse, we took stock and realized that we had no money, no real product, and no customers. That still didn’t deter us. We wouldn’t give up, and that stubborn belief in ourselves worked. By the first week of October, we had our first paying customer. By the end of November, we managed to raise $250,000 in funds. In January of 2012 we hired our first two team members. We were running on adrenalin, and watching Plivo come to life was a rush like no other.

After we gained traction and more paying customers, we knew we were onto something. So, in 2012, after a second pitch, we were selected for Y Combinator’s summer 2012 batch. Four of us worked 22-hour days out of two tiny apartments across two continents. I wouldn’t advocate that every startup work this way. It’s a surefire way to burn out quickly. I’m simply stating that in order to succeed, you must put in the hours, do the legwork, stay focused, and believe in what you’re doing. That’s how we were able to launch the cloud-hosted version of Plivo in July 2012, and were subsequently able to launch in 50 countries just one month later. In December that year, we also raised $1.75M from some of the best VCs in the world.

Today, we’re set to take the market by storm. This never-give-up, go-getter attitude is something we take pride in. It’s why customers trust us and have built their businesses on us. Our confidence and attitude is pretty much what defines us at Plivo.

Lesson 2: How playing in a punk rock band can make you a better founder

At 22, my friend and co-founder, Mike, played in a punk rock band. No really, that’s what he did for five years before becoming a systems engineer. From his music-making days, Mike learned that good performance is all about how well the band members jam together. That energy is reflected in their output.

In our early days, ensuring good performance was a key goal. Every team member focused on making the API the best it could be — great quality, smooth, easy-to-use, convenient, and feature-rich. As we grew, we made a few mistakes; made some wrong hires and a few incorrect assumptions. Our biggest mistake was trying to fit the Plivo culture to the team we were building, rather than the other way around. When the light bulb went off in our heads, we realized we needed team members who understood where we were coming from and where we wanted to go. We wanted people who would work hard to keep our flag flying high. Today, the Plivo team reminds me of a band of musicians who connect, coordinate, and jam together effortlessly. We perform well because we’re in synergy, always backing one another.

People sometimes ask me, their voices laden with skepticism, if having our core teams located remotely is actually effective. I always answer with a resounding “Yes!” It’s a model that we consciously decided to follow for Plivo. While we were incorporated in San Francisco, our remote teams operate effectively, coordinating smoothly with their counterparts in the US. This has really benefitted us. We’ve had a vast pool of extremely good talent to pick from, making it easy to hire a great team, and have also saved on costs. Most importantly, we were able to put into place a system that ensures 24/7 support and help for customers and prospects, no matter where in the world they’re located. We’re lean but tough, and we intend to grow strategically, scaling up as our clients’ businesses grow.

How can we prove that our remote team model really works? Well, consider these statistics and achievements. Last year alone, our customer base grew 400%, and the figure was even higher for registered users. In the last quarter (2014), thanks to outstanding teamwork, our SMS traffic grew 500% and voice traffic grew 150%. In 2013, our product team launched Plivo SDK, the voice transcription feature, and app demos within our Plivo dashboard. That to me is clear proof that this model works.

Lesson 3: How opening a restaurant helped me understand our customers today

Some years ago, fatigued by uninteresting roles in large companies, I started a tiny food outlet selling dumplings in Ahmedabad, India. From that short-lived stint, I learned that no matter what kind of business you’re in, customers have an appetite for great quality, and a product is sure to succeed if it meets a need. Thus the potato dumpling was born — a terrible insult to the tasty traditional dumpling, but something that my customers ate up … quite literally. In other words, if you’ve got the right offerings on the menu, people will demand it. What has this got to do with the lessons we’ve learned at Plivo? Everything!

When we first started, admittedly it was tempting to scale up quickly, to keep putting out new products, and have a large team, in order to stay in the limelight. Innovation and R&D were always in the cards, but what we soon realized was that the success of our customers’ business was closely linked with how well our products functioned. The bottom line was that our customers were building businesses on Plivo, which meant that quality, uptime, low latency, and high scalability mattered most. And since we were running an infrastructure business, the bigger our customers grew, the bigger we grew. It was a really simple equation. That taught us an invaluable lesson — if we helped customers succeed in business, we would succeed too.

Here’s some food for thought — are you serving your customers something that will benefit their businesses? We put the promise of high quality on the Plivo menu, and once customers had a taste of what we offered, the demand for our products grew tremendously. Plivo is all about solving customer pain points, and we deliver on our promise of a superior experience at an affordable price. This makes our customers confident that they would not lose business due to poor quality or lack of support. By continuing to improve our existing products, we also continue to offer our customers the opportunity to grow their businesses without fear, because they know that we can scale to match their growth.

Essentially, the effort we put into our products gives us a rapidly growing pool of loyal customers, who in turn help us boost our voice and SMS traffic. This enables us to negotiate for more Tier 1 routes and better pricing on their behalf. This means that we can pass on those savings to our customers — and the cycle continues.

So what about the future? What about the next three years? Will the three stepping-stones I described above lead us to a bigger and better place on the global map of startups? I certainly believe so! But as we enter our fourth year of operations, there are other things on my mind. Right now I’m thinking, with a great deal of excitement, about tough new challenges ahead and new lessons we’re going to learn. We’re entering a vibrant phase. Is it going to be hard? Yes! Are we going to love breaking past those barriers that come our way? Yes we are. And we’re going to have a lot of fun along the way too. Challenges you say? I say, bring them on. We’re ready and waiting to meet them head on.

Venky, Co-founder at Plivo Inc.

As of today, you can apply for a US short code number to use to send your SMS messages through Plivo. With short codes, you can have:

• Fast direct-to-customer communication — Send at a default base rate of 50 SMS messages per second.
• Higher marketing conversion rates — SMS interactions have higher marketing conversions than other modes of communication.
• One nationwide identity — You can reserve exclusive rights to your own short code and give your users a simple five- or six-digit number to reach you.

Porting your short codes to Plivo

If you already have short codes and would like Plivo to send your SMS messages, we offer two packages: one where we handle your short code lease and one in which you handle your lease directly with the Common Short Code Administrator (CSCA). Depending on your carrier, porting may take up to a few weeks from the time of application.

Visit our short code page for more details and pricing.

Last Friday, at our Open-source Show and Tell event we launched VoiceChatAPI.com, a free open source out-of-the-box audio conferencing app exposed via an API. We built it to solve our own frustrations with current conference apps. We wanted it to be super easy to use with zero friction, which meant no signups, no downloads, and no usernames or pins. It should just work. Check out the result at VoiceChatAPI.com.

On the grand scheme of things, we wanted to spark more dialogue about how we communicate and empower people to reach for better solutions and it looks like people were listening. With over a day on the front page of Hacker News and Reddit, we were able to bring a lot of attention to how we can start leveraging new (and open-source) technology to disrupt the market. We’re collecting data on this project and we’ll share it publicly in a follow-up post in two weeks.

Check out our entire presentation on Slideshare and we hope to see you at our next open source event.

Our friends at telecomm carrier Flowroute recently posted about how to innovate with your POTS connection. The article highlights the downside of relying on pure POTS connections and how API offerings like Plivo help fill the gap and bring legacy infrastructure into 2014 and beyond.

Let’s get 2014 started on the right track by keeping in touch with friends and family throughout the year using this nifty Plivo and Mailgun API project. Connect your Plivo phone number to your email via your Mailgun account and receive email notifications every time you get an SMS message. You can even reply to messages straight from your email inbox.

You can build this gateway for free using:

• A free Plivo trial account. Once you’ve registered you can claim a free local US phone number by clicking Buy Number from the Phone Numbers page of the Plivo console.

• A free Mailgun account.

• A free Heroku account. If you’re new to Heroku, visit the Getting Started page for guides on setting up your account. Create a new app and install the free RedisToGo add-on, which provides functionality for Redis, a key-value NoSQL database. In our example, we call our app your-heroku-app.

Push the application code to Heroku

Once you’ve created accounts on all three platforms, download the sample code for our plivomessenger application using Git. if you’re not familiar with Git, you can learn about it from Pro Git, a free online ebook.

$ git clone https://github.com/plivo/apps.git
$ cp -r apps/plivomessenger mailgunapp
$ cd mailgunapp

Then git push the application to Heroku.

$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "init"
$ heroku create
$ git push heroku master
$ heroku scale web=1

Configure your credentials in Heroku

This SMS-to-email gateway requires your Plivo authentication credentials and phone number, which you can find on the overview page of the Plivo console. Check out Heroku’s variable configuration tutorial if you need help.

$ heroku config:set PLIVO_AUTH_ID=your-plivo-auth-id
$ heroku config:set PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN=your-plivo-auth-token
$ heroku config:set PLIVO_NUMBER=your-SMS-enabled-plivo-number</code>

Use any of your Plivo phone numbers from the Phone Numbers page of the Plivo console.

You also need to supply your Mailgun credentials, which you can get from the Mailgun Control Panel.

$ heroku config:set MAILGUN_ACCESS_KEY=your-mailgun-access-key
$ heroku config:set MAILGUN_SERVER_NAME=yourdomain.com

Configure Plivo

With Heroku properly configured, it’s time to let Plivo know where to find your SMS-to-email gateway application.

Visit the Voice > Applications page of the Plivo console and click Add New Application. Give a name to your application — we called ours “SMS Forward.” Set the Primary Answer URL and Message URL to

https://your-heroku-app.herokuapp.com/forward/?Emails=youremail@yourdomain.com. Then click Create Application.

Now assign your Plivo phone number to the application. Go to the Phone Numbers page and select the phone number you want to use. On the next screen, from the Application Type drop-down, select XML Application. From the Plivo Application drop-down, select the name of your application. Click Update Number to save your changes.

It’s not required, but it’s good practice to run the application locally to make sure everything is working properly. To do that, paste this link in your browser. Be sure to insert your own Heroku application URL and your email address:

https://your-heroku-app.herokuapp.com/forward/?Emails=youremail@yourdomain.com&From=1000&To=1000&Text=Test

The browser should display an empty <Response> XML document.

Configure your Plivo credentials in Mailgun

Now, time to do a little configuration for Mailgun. First, configure your DNS with a subdomain for incoming email. For this example, we set up my.plivo.com as our email domain by adding DNS records on Amazon Route 53. Most domain registrars offer similar zone editing software.

Let Mailgun know where to send your email

Next, in your Mailgun account, set up a mail domain for my.yourdomain.com:

Then add your route to Mailgun. Click on the Route tab in Mailgun and add a new route with the following parameters:

Filter Expression: match_recipient(“^(.*)@ my.yourdomain.com$”)
Actions: forward("http://your-heroku-app.herokuapp.com/reverse/?")

That’s it! You can now try out your SMS-to-email gateway.

Test SMS to email

Try sending a text message to your SMS-enabled Plivo number. It should arrive in the inbox at youremail@yourdomain.com, as configured. The email will have originated from yourphonenumber@my.yourdomain.com.

Test email to SMS

Now try replying to that email. The reply should go back to your phone. In our application, we only let email forward to numbers from which we received a request.

Last week we had an interesting conversation with Anthony Nemitz. He’s a co-founder of Elastic, the team behind ElasticSales and the recently launched sales platform Close. We covered a variety of topics, from their major pivot to why Close is uniquely positioned in the CRM space and how they selected Plivo to power seamless voice call integration.

Anthony Nemitz

What’s your elevator pitch for Close?

Close allows your sales team to make and receive more calls and emails than anything else on the market. We’re truly sales software.

Who’s an ideal customer for Close?

Today, our most successful customers are between three and 30 sales reps, handling a mix of inbound and outbound sales, primarily in the B2B SaaS market. That being said, we’re still learning how our product fits into the larger sales software space and what types of teams will be most successful using it.

When did you start the company and how has the journey been so far?

Thomas, Steli, and myself went through Y Combinator as a company called SwipeGood in the winter of 2011. In late 2012 we shut the SwipeGood business down, starting ElasticSales — consulting and outsourcing the sales efforts of companies in their growth and exploration phases. Close was launched in early 2013 and is the culmination of many external sales campaigns and the learnings of our internal ElasticSales team.

How big is your team now and where are you located?

Very small! We’re a team of six. While we’re primarily based in downtown Palo Alto, CA, we’re constantly traveling and finding new ways to expand our virtual workspace.

How many countries do you have customers in?

Our primary growth has been in the US, but we’ve been surprised at the adoption around the world. From Taiwan to Brazil, we’ve found a good deal of demand servicing non-US businesses.

How fast is Close growing?

“We don’t disclose numbers we’re not legally obligated to.” — Steve Jobs

What got you started building Close?

At ElasticSales, we gained a competitive edge by building our own set of sales tools. From bulk email to predictive dialers to entire phone systems, we built it all. At some point we looked at all of the things we’d built and realized how valuable they would be to everyone outside of ElasticSales.

Coming from this perspective of “let’s build the tools we need ourselves” gave us a lot of leeway in terms of vision and design. You could barely call the first few versions of Close a CRM — it just wasn’t designed with the traditional CRM type functionality in mind. What we knew the most about was sales software: how to send more emails, make more calls, or optimize our touchpoints based on past performance, lead source, time of day, etc.

What’s the unique selling proposition of Close given the existing CRM solutions, like Salesforce?

Close’s value proposition is simple: You’re going to send more emails, make more calls, and close more deals using our platform than any other system out there. We’ve also developed the most powerful search system for your sales data that can answer almost any type of question you can throw at it: for instance, give me all leads from Australia who I haven’t called this week but who have opened my last email newsletter within the last 24 hours. You’re also able to access our engineer-staffed support almost 24/7 — something I haven’t seen from anyone else in our space.

I will say, though, that if you need a Swiss Army knife CRM with integrations to AdWords or QuickBooks or Sharepoint, we’re not it. While we generally get lumped into the CRM market, we don’t think of ourselves from a CRM perspective. That’s why we have radical views on things like transparency, lead lists, lead assignment, and how your workflow should be structured. If you come from a CRM-centric mindset it takes a bit to wrap your head around Close, and that’s OK — it means we’re pushing the sales software industry forward. Our software is simply designed to help you sell better, period.

You’ve pivoted several times. Looking back, what has been the biggest takeaway?

Ruthless contrarianism. I want to be doing all the things other companies and entrepreneurs aren’t. Looking back at all of the gambles we’ve made as a business, the most successful have been those where we’ve intentionally done the opposite of others in our position. Don’t be afraid to shake things up.

Why did you build Mac and Windows native apps versus a web app?

It really boils down to this: First, sales is so important that it should be within its own app, not just another tab in your browser.

Secondly, not every company is a startup running the latest version of Chrome or Firefox, so building a completely WebRTC-based calling platform was out of the question. We also hated the idea of making folks use Flash to call — I basically leave your site immediately if I have to use Flash :)

Lastly, when you’re talking about power-user type telephony — dialers, automatic gain control, network diagnostics, etc., you need to have access to the OS. Building out our native app is going to allow us to push the envelope further and faster than anyone stuck solely in the browser.

Why did you think it was crucial to integrate phone capability into Close?

Simple: phone calls and emails are the way products get sold. Without a seamless calling integration, you’re killing your sales team’s productivity.

Was there any special reason behind your choice of Plivo?

For over a year we were managing and building out our own phone infrastructure using Asterisk. We were just about to migrate to FreeSWITCH when we had heard about Plivo. We had a long conversation internally and ultimately we recognized that we needed a telephony partner that would help us scale up and automate a lot of the manual processes we had in place.

We obviously considered the usual suspects in the space, but Plivo provided the best mix of features, 24/7 customer support, price, and dedication to call quality. It was also really important for us to be able to interact with our telephony partner at the deepest technical levels. We’re in the trenches every day looking at SIP logs, packet captures, and call routes, so we needed a really hands-on technical partner that would get into the nitty-gritty details of VoIP.

What specific features of Plivo does Close use?

We generate SIP endpoints for each Close application, rent and manage DIDs, record calls, and make extensive use of the Dial element to offer our customers call forwarding and ring group functionality. We also have a suite of automated tests that constantly probe the calling infrastructure, allowing us to know about potential issues immediately.

Let’s say you were speaking with a developer friend — how would you explain how inbound and outbound calls work in Close?

Let’s dive into our call flow after this conversation.

And he later sent this:

SIP_HEADERS = [‘X-PH-CALL-ID’, ‘X-PH-ORGANIZATION-ID’, ‘X-PH-LEAD-ID’]

Inbound:

1) Inbound call hits Plivo.

2) Plivo sends a request to the Close API.

3) We look up the To phone number in the Close database to determine what user/ring group to send the call to.

4 a) If the call is to a specific Close.io user we might send back dial XML like this: Amjad

4 b) If the call is to a ring group, we dial multiple numbers like this:

If we’re only calling Plivo-registered SIP endpoints (and have no Number elements within the Dial) we can skip adding the confirmKey and confirmSound. They’re only used to prevent a scenario where a call is connected to the Number element and it may actually be a voicemail — not a real person — in which case we want the other SIP phones to continue ringing. This also allows us to always return the Close voicemail prompt when including both Close and non-Close phone numbers within a ring group.

Outbound

1) JavaScript initiates a POST to the Close.io API /activities/call/ endpoint.

2) Call information is passed to the built-in SIP client through our JavaScript<->Native bridge.

3) Native SIP client initiates outbound dial, passing SIP_HEADERS along to Plivo.

4) Plivo makes a request to Close’s API with the call XML.

5) Close responds with the dial XML, including the Close user’s caller ID and the number to be dialed.

6) Plivo dials the recipient’s number, connecting the Close SIP client.

How do you use Plivo’s SIP offering?

We assign an endpoint (Plivo terminology for a SIP account) to each device registered with Close. When you log in to your Close account within the native app, we look up the SIP account details and initiate the application’s SIP client registration. At that point your Close app is ready to make and receive calls.

What did you do when you needed any technical help or had an issue?

Simple — we just ping the Plivo DevOps team. They’re almost always available through their 24/7 chat support or email. I’d especially like to thank Keshav, Nishad, and Rakesh, who have been extremely instrumental in making Close’s calling integration what it is today. Given what we’ve experienced with Plivo so far, we’re confident that when issues arise, the team at Plivo will resolve them quickly.

Today’s a big day for Plivo — we’re announcing support for bring your own carrier (BYOC). This is delightful news for enterprises, telephony service providers, and teams of developers. We like to think of BYOC support as a huge step forward toward what we envisioned from day 1: an open, scalable API platform for everyone who needs voice and messaging capabilities.

To understand how BYOC works it’s helpful to understand how cloud telephony itself works at a high level. You can think of cloud telephony as having three key components: technology, operations and infrastructure, and carrier. Technology refers to the software that delivers communications services such as call tracking software or SIP trunking. Infrastructure is where the technology is based, such as media servers that deal with signaling. Operations mean a team (or a proxy of one) that does the maintenance work of the infrastructure. And the last piece is a carrier, which gives you the ability to connect to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

These elements make cloud telephony possible, and they tend to be offered by API providers as a bundled product.

What BYOC gives you is the magical ability to unbundle the carrier part and use the carrier that best suits your use case.

What BYOC means to you

Now you have the ability to use any existing carrier that you have a contract with or choose a carrier that gives you the most favorable deal. You can use whatever carrier gives you the biggest cost advantage.

You can also expand your international business in a local area where an API provider doesn’t have a relationship with any carrier in the region. You can sign a contract with the local carrier on your own and let us connect with the carrier.

Not enough for you? Here are three reasons factors that might get you more excited.

First, think about a situation where you’re forced by an API provider to deal with a certain set of carriers in order to use their API. If you have an existing contract with a carrier that the API provider doesn’t support, you have no choice but to give up on the relationship, even if you’ve been happy with them for years. In a business world, relationships mean dollars.

Second, think about migration cost. Changing carriers means changing phone numbers and lines. Porting numbers takes time. The migration overhead, especially for a business with established communication infrastructure, won’t be negligible.

Third, think about the possibility of reducing the service cost by avoiding a steep markup price imposed by cloud API providers.

These are all somewhat hidden cost. We’ve learned that most API users aren’t full informed of these costs — nor are they aware that they can avoid them.

How you can use BYOC

You can configure BYOC in the Plivo console and via our API. You can easily set the carriers of your choice and connect them to our cloud. We allow you to use existing VoIP DIDs and phone numbers virtually anywhere across the globe. That means you can use your existing outbound termination routes from any carrier, including those that require dedicated IP-based authentication. Practically speaking, you can use only the cloud infrastructure part of Plivo. And you will be charged a flat rate of $0.004 per minute. In other words, you get only what you need and pay only for what you actually use.

Why we’re doing this

Over the past two years we’ve seen businesses and teams reluctant to move to the cloud due to carrier lock-in. Most API providers can’t offer BYOC due to their underlying business model, where they primarily resell carrier minutes with markups. But Plivo can.

Case in point

This year we partnered with Oracle Acme to enable one of the major engineering universities in the US to interconnect our cloud platform with their existing infrastructure. The flexibility we offered enabled the university staff and students to create exciting new communications applications — WebRTC, IVR, conferencing, and other solutions.

Along with the cloud advantage and the seamless interoperability with existing hardware that Plivo delivers, the ability to bring their own carrier was pivotal for the university. They already had communication infrastructure set up — session border controllers, phone numbers, incoming routes and outgoing routes. Had they used other cloud service providers, they would have had to sever the relationship with the telecom they’ve used for years in order to move their infrastructure to the cloud. With Plivo, they could migrate their setup to the cloud without losing the ability to keep their existing numbers and lines.

Sign up today to bring your own carrier to Plivo.

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