Twilio retains global CPaaS crown as Asia Pacific market surges

US-based cloud communications platform vendor Twilio has retained its leadership in the global communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) market as the market segment sees major growth, especially in the Asia Pacific region.

This is according to new data by market analyst firm Synergy Research Group, which suggested that during the second calendar quarter of this year, the CPaaS market grew over 40 per cent year-on-year worldwide.

This momentum provides a solid foundation for increased development of communication and software technologies, creating and enhancing new customer interactions and experiences, according to Synergy.

Given the surge in remote engagement resulting from disruptions caused by the ongoing pandemic, it should come as little surprise that the CPaaS market is doing well. Indeed, Synergy claims to have measured seven-fold market growth for the CPaaS market over the last 18 quarters.

According to Synergy’s research, the CPaaS market globally is on track to exceed US$5 billion in 2021, with each of the major four regions around the world driving strong growth.  

Amid this ongoing growth, Twilio maintained its number one market share ranking during the three-month period to the end of June 2021.

However, while Twilio remains the clear worldwide market share leader, other vendors like Vonage, Sinch, bandwidth, MessageBird and 8×8 have stronger market share positions across the regional markets driven by their successful focus on areas of local expertise.  

This is illustrated in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region particularly, where Synergy claims that Vonage is the number one CPaaS vendor, followed by Twilio and Sinch.  

In the second quarter of 2021, the APAC region enjoyed the fastest year-on-year growth in the CPaaS market of all the major regions around the world, exceeding 55 per cent year-on-year, well above the global average of 40 per cent.  

And it seems like there’s plenty of growth potential left in the market.

“We believe we are at the beginning of the CPaaS evolution as sophisticated customer engagement and advanced communications can become the key building blocks of future communication tools” said Fazil Balkaya, principal analyst at Synergy Research Group.

“Today the primary application for CPaaS is consumer-based SMS, providing transactional connectivity between mobile devices and emerging cloud services.  

“We believe the technology is poised to provide significant enhancements to business communications and sophisticated customer service applications, driving this market to the US$14 billion mark by 2025,” he added.

As reported in January, communications has been identified as one of the top areas of IT action in the ASEAN region specifically this year as enterprises began to reshuffle their technology priorities to address the impact of Covid-19.

According to fellow industry analyst firm GlobalData, the growing activity in the broader communications segment was expected to see domestic players enter the CPaaS market.