Twilio (News - Alert) announced today that its Elastic SIP Trunking (EST) service is now available globally. The service, which was had been available in beta since last November, offers faster deployment than the typical cloud phone system, more flexible pricing, and can easily be scaled to meet fluctuations in usage.

San Francisco-based Twilio offers cloud-based telephony solutions and related APIs for developers. According to its site, the company provides POPs in five different continents, resulting in low latency times when making a voice call. SMS products; programming tools that allow developers to include access to Twilio through smartphone app code and a WebRTC client are among the company’s other solutions.

If Twilio’s claims are true about EST, it would be well-suited for just about any cloud based communications environment. The solution would work for anything from a small business that only does business locally to a large corporation that has numerous offices and/or customers across the globe.

A Twilio system can be up and running quickly, and scaled up or down as needed. The pricing is such that the customer only pays for what it uses. If the service fails to meet a 99.95 percent uptime threshold, customers get a minimum 10 percent credit.

The company was the subject of many IPO rumors three weeks ago after reaching a 2014 revenue run rate of $100 million. One interesting aspect of Twilio’s overall strategy is the way it reaches out to developers. According to a Wall Street Journal blog by Lizette Chapman, Twilio was present at over 500 developer events in 2014. The APIs that the company promotes allow developers to create apps that leverage Twilio functionality in a customized solution. This could be very lucrative since Twilio charges a fee each time the API is invoked from an app.

Twilio’s critics suggest that in spite of its recent success, it does not have the muscle to compete against telecom giants like AT&T (News - Alert) or Verizon. The fact that it has Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Uber and eHarmony among its customers would seem to contradict some of the criticism. Twilio has created a product with compelling features that is easy to setup with a pricing model that could make it very prosperous.