Is this worrisome for the future of twilio? Now it sounds like they are entering yet another low margin commoditized business. What could be the synergies with the existing business areas?
My employer is a customer of Twilio and Sendgrid, and for the exact same reasons: Sending notifications to customers via SMS and/or email, depending on circumstances.
I suspect we represent a core customer type for both firms, and I rather suspect they have a pretty extensive overlap in their client list, so some obvious synergies will be around support, APIs, account management, etc.
Fundamentally, their business is about running APIs that let them accept incoming requests from people like me, processing it, and then passing it on to some very ugly external services that will (eventually, hopefully) display a text message to someone at the far end. That's a lot of overlap!
Both sending SMSes and emails require relationship management with the other companies involved - the mobile networks and the large email providers - and, related, large-scale sender-side spam prevention.
Aside from that, Twilio can now act as almost a one-stop shop for your outbound communication needs - all that’s left is physical letters.
It seems like a perfect fit for Twilio, if they were expanding into something well outside their core offering that would be concerning. If you're a customer of Twilio there's a good chance you'll also find Sendgrid useful and vice versa.
