Mega sized cloud telecommunications company, Twilio, came to visit the Treehouse earlier this week. The Account Managers and Solution Engineer was in town, they operate primarily from San Francisco, and stopped in to visit members of the Software Development team.

Twilio hangs their hat on being a cloud-based communications platform, allowing for the likes of call centers and large businesses to be able to run their businesses efficiently and on a large-scale format by leveraging off their web service API’s.

When we refer to large businesses, some of Twilio’s clients are the likes of Hulu, Uber, Lyft, Dell and more, so the fact that we are able to get the personalized service that we do with Twilio, amongst the ranks of these large brands, makes us very proud here at the Treehouse. And the fact that the service is programmatically driven by their software, linking to us by means of an API, Application Programming Interface (which is simply the place out in the ether where their software ends and ours picks up for that last mile), it makes sense they came to visit the Software Development team. That’s because with all the thousands of phone numbers that we have registered with them, to best serve our dealers, the magic clearly happens in both the relationship, as well as the background coding and integration with both our systems.

On the agenda was the topic of spam calling, which as we all know is a universal problem at this time, not just limited to businesses. Think of all the times you have either purposefully ignored a call on your mobile because the number was unknown, or you answered and you were greeted by a machine either trying to sell you something, or scare you into buying something. This kind of frustration lives in the business realm and both Twilio and the Treehouse are looking at ways to combat this for our dealers.

This is no easy task, but everyone put their heads together to try and find ways to help limit this. An interesting point to note is that in August 2019, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has passed new rules that prohibits anyone from transmitting the wrong caller information, with the intent of either misleading or causing harm to the recipient, i.e. “spoofing”. The roll out of this ruling is to be seen, as all telecommunications companies need to be on board to implement this effectively.

But in the interim, both Twilio and the Treehouse are working furiously to try and limit this as much as possible.