Twilio CRO on How the Channel Fits Into Company’s Growth Strategy

Twilio is a vendor delivering customer engagement solutions through a platform experience. The company’s tools include capabilities across multi-channel digital communications, identity verification, call centers, and other use cases. Now, the company is addressing new market demands for AI-enabled solutions and the overall shift towards unified customer experience technologies.

As Twilio announced at its Investor Day programming in January, the company considers its channel partnerships a core pillar of its planned 2025 success. Chief Revenue Officer Thomas Wyatt shared who the company works with and why in an interview with Channel Insider.

Twilio’s 2025 roadmap includes heavy investment in partnerships

The company outlined its core growth levers for the year during its Investor Day in January. Among them, Wyatt says, is an added emphasis on how the company leverages its partnerships to grow internationally and drive deeper value within the market share it already holds in North America.

“Our partners, including systems integrators and resellers, have been really helpful in our goals to expand into markets like EMEA,” Wyatt said. “They, in many cases, have existing relationships with customers in markets we haven’t really established in, and that gives us some leverage without having to necessarily hire account executives in each market immediately.”

Twilio has also leaned into the ongoing shift in how buyers want to purchase their technology by forming partnerships with leading cloud marketplaces like those curated by AWS and Microsoft Azure. Wyatt notes that while not all of the company’s solutions are available to purchase on these platforms, the availability of even some of the line card meets customer demand and expands the potential user base of Twilio’s tools.

“We’ve always seen it as a net positive, because we know a lot of our customers are looking to make purchases on these marketplaces anyway,” Wyatt said. “Customers can utilize their cloud credits to purchase Twilio even if they didn’t have it in their tech budgets to do otherwise.”

ISVs and integrators already driving value and innovation

Twillio’s focus on partnerships is in many ways driven by previous success with channel organizations, primarily systems integrators, who work with Twilio to build integrations and use cases for end-user customers interested in the products.

“We have some SIs we work with quite closely and build co-sell relationships with, where the SIs can take on the integration and procurement work for customers we see who want our products,” Wyatt said. “Others, they don’t work as much with us directly but they are still key to how our products can get to customers that want them.”

Additionally, Wyatt says the company has found great success with a network of ISVs who build their products on top of Twilio’s own solutions to add vertical expertise or additional features to the base layer of what Twilio provides.

These ISV relationships are showing what the future of app development looks like, as core product companies form the foundation for a new market of tailored solutions. Wyatt wants Twillio to capitalize on this in the way some of the tech industry’s largest companies already have.

“The same way I go to Amazon to get my cloud infrastructure, and I might go to Databricks to get my data streaming services for my app, I’m going to need these other pieces from Twillio, and we just become a building block of the next generation of applications.”

2025: the year of AI-fueled disruption in customer experience market

Like virtually every other business, Twilio has its eyes on how AI and other pressures are shifting the broader tech landscape. Additionally, Wyatt says the company notes shifts within the customer experience industry that he wants Twilio to capitalize on.

“What’s happening is these applications are being rewritten in some ways like through…agentic frameworks, or at least simplifying the number of clicks that are required to complete a task,” Wyatt said. “And so what we’re finding is that a lot of these these builder type companies that are building these software applications are coming to Twilio, and they’re building their AI workloads on top of us.”

Wyatt notes what he calls a market convergence taking shape, in which traditional CCaaS, CPaaS, and CDP offerings are blurring together as customers demand more hands-on and personalized interactions with companies. This all means many organizations are looking for solutions, like Twilio’s platform, in which multiple communications channels and additional services around security, fraud risk, and AI enablement are available in one motion.

Twilio is one of many tech vendors working with channel partners to achieve shared goals. Read more about how partner programs are changing as channel dynamics shift.