Twilio: A Successful PaaS Story

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The global pandemic is helping cloud-based companies significantly. Communications PaaS player, Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), is witnessing a strong growth in its financials. Recently, it announced its second quarter results that surpassed market expectations on all fronts.

Twilio’s Financials

Twilio’s second quarter revenues grew an impressive 46% to $400.8 million, surging ahead of the market’s forecast of $367.6 million. Adjusted net income grew three times to $0.09 per share, again shattering the market’s expectations of a loss of $0.09 per share.

Among key metrics, its active customer accounts grew 24% to 200,000 compared. The company ended the quarter with 3,284 employees. Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate, which is calculated using total revenue, was 132% compared to 141% reported a year ago.

Twilio did not provide any outlook for the year. It expects to end the third quarter with revenues of $401-$406 million which was also significantly ahead of the Street’s forecast of $375.4 million.

Twilio’s Growing Partners

During the quarter, Twilio continued to expand its relationship with its partners and customers. For instance, Zoom which was already a customer for Twilio, added email capabilities to enable Twilio to deliver emails in a timely fashion. It also expanded its relationship with Peloton, which also added an email infrastructure to allow Twilio to send out marketing emails.

Besides email marketing, Twilio is also witnessing a strong demand for its contact center product Flex. Flex is particularly useful in current conditions for contact tracing. Twilio has worked with several universities and city and state governments to help them prepare to reopen safely and efficiently. During the quarter, it signed more than 25 transactions with organizations including New York City and New Mexico to support this initiative. Flex is also helping companies reduce costs by moving from expensive on-premises implementations to the cloud.

I believe Twilio is one player who has nailed the PaaS strategy. In 2014, when I had spoken with its CEO Jeff Lawson, the company had over 400,000 developers. Today Twilio boasts of a platform that has over 8 million developers globally that help support over 795 billion interactions across its platform.

Its stock is currently trading at $251 with a market cap of $37.36 billion. The stock had climbed to a 52-week high of $288.81 late last month. It has recovered from its 52-week low of $68.06 in March this year amid all the market turbulence.

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Photo credit: Ken Yeung/Flickr.com.