Microsoft Launches Cloud Communications Services To Rival Twilio

Microsoft Corporation MSFT on Tuesday launched Azure Communications Services, composed of cloud-based voice and video calling, chat, and telephony features.

What Happened: The new features are built natively on top of the tech giant’s Azure cloud, according to TechCrunch, which earlier reported the news.

Businesses can reportedly utilize additional smart services to roll out their communication services such as translation tools.

“We see rich communication experiences – enabled by voice, video, chat, and SMS – continuing to be an integral part in how businesses connect with their customers across devices and platforms,”  said Scott Van Vliet, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for intelligent communication.

Why It Matters: Alphabet Inc GOOGL GOOG and Amazon.com, Inc AMZN offer some of the features but both do not have a fully-featured communication service in place as of yet, noted TechCrunch.

The cloud new service by the Redmond-based tech giant is more of a competitor to Twilio Inc TWLO and the upcoming MessageBird’s services.

Microsoft is using the same low latency global communication network for the new feature set that it uses to support 5 billion meeting minutes for its Teams service, according to Van Vliet.

Last year the global cloud infrastructure market reached $107 billion, a rise of 37% year-over-year, according to data released by Canalys in February.

Amazon Web Services is the top player in the cloud service market as of Q4 2019 with 32.4% of the market share, while Microsoft Azure came in second with 17.6% market share.

Price Action: Microsoft shares closed nearly 2.4% higher at $207.42 on Tuesday.