Orchestrating Notifications with TwilioOrchestrating Notifications with Twilio

As the messaging landscape gets more complex, Twilio Notify provides a way to manage all the chaos.

Twilio kicked off day two of Signal, its conference for developers in communications, with the announcement of Twilio Notify, an API that enables businesses to orchestrate notifications across multiple different channels and applications.

With this API, Twilio's aim is to help businesses grapple with the increasingly complex messaging ecosystem so that they can more effectively manage customer communications at scale, said Manav Khurana, VP of Product Marketing at Twilio, who I spoke with ahead of the event.

"The messaging landscape is growing too quickly for businesses to keep up," Khurana said. "It's increasingly difficult to reach customers on their preferred messaging channel." Because this can be such a challenge, often organizations will wind up sending messages out to everyone on every channel, and this just isn't an ideal way to interact with customers, he added.

Where in the past, developers would need to integrate the various messaging channels into corporate software or create complicated orchestration logic, Twilio Notify lets them simply specify customers for an intended message. The API intelligently reaches out to those customers using their channels of choice.

The Notify API leverages factors like user preference, group membership, history of device and channel use, current activity, and delivery success to intelligently deliver notifications to customers. These can be sent through a broad range of channels, including SMS, Apple Push Notifications service, Google Cloud Messaging service, and messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Further, Khurana said, the Notify service helps developers to more easily segment users into groups with tags indicating things like office location, channel preference, business groups, device types and more -- which then informs how an organization sends notifications.

Managing messaging, at scale, while being able to accommodate your customers' usage preferences is absolutely critical for business success today," said Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson in the press release on the news. "Twilio Notify makes it easy for businesses to address the constantly changing world of messaging and focus on who they want to notify and what they want to say."

The Notify API announcement comes on the heels of the debut of Twilio Programmable Wireless, which Twilio unveiled yesterday at Signal. As I wrote in yesterday's post, "Twilio Dives into IoT, Signals the Future of Comms," in a nutshell is a partnership with T-Mobile to open up cellular network for developers to build on for Internet of Things and enterprise connectivity.

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