Bandwidth Stock

Bandwidth Inc. operates as a global cloud-based, software-powered communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) provider that enables enterprises to create, scale and operate voice or messaging communications services across any mobile application or connected device.

The company enables innovative organizations—from startup app developers to the world’s largest enterprises—to engage their end-users and deliver exceptional experiences everywhere people live, learn, work and play. Backed by the Bandwidth Communications Cloud, the company’s global owned-and-operated network spanning more than 65 countries reaching over 90 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), innovative enterprises use Bandwidth’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to easily embed voice, messaging and emergency services capabilities into software and applications. Bandwidth was the first cloud communications provider to offer a robust selection of APIs built on the company’s own cloud platform.

With the combination of its software APIs, the company’s global Communications Cloud and its broad range of experience with global regulatory frameworks, Bandwidth is one of the best-positioned providers in its space to deliver business-critical communications for global enterprises. In fact, Bandwidth already powers all the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders in the key cloud communications categories of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).

Go-to-Market Strategy

Bandwidth’s go-to-market strategy is designed around the global shift from on-premises based technology to cloud-based communications. The company is the only global Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider that also owns and operates its own cloud communications network.

Market Offering 1: Global Communications Plans: This serves the leading power platforms at the forefront of the communications transformation in UCaaS and CCaaS, through a business-to-business-to-business (B2B2B) delivery model. The company enables these customers to rapidly automate voice, global number management, emergency services, and many other services on a scalable, global basis.

Market Offering 2: Programmable Services: This comprises the company’s text messaging solutions, through which it supports innovative SaaS platforms with use cases like retail and eCommerce promotions, financial services identity authentication, and healthcare patient engagement, through a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) delivery model. Programmable Services customers come to the company’s Bandwidth Communications Cloud because it offers high capacity, volume and deliverability.

Market Offering 3: Global Enterprises: This category is a business-to-business channel, where Global 2000 enterprises engage directly with the company to leverage its services in their digital transformation. Bandwidth’s new Maestro platform is designed to accelerate these customers’ transitions from on-premises equipment to a hybrid or fully cloud-based solution utilizing integrations with leading UCaaS, CCaaS, voice authentication, conversational AI, and other platforms.

Market Offering 1: Global Communications Plans

Through its Global Communications Plans market offering, the company powers all the leaders in UCaaS and CCaaS, as recognized by the research firm Gartner, including Microsoft, Google, Zoom, RingCentral, Genesys, and Five9. The company has been co-creating with many of these customers for more than a decade.

These leaders rely on Bandwidth to deliver the voice, messaging, and emergency services that are central to their own user experiences. The company’s APIs also expedite customer onboarding with real-time global programmable number management (ordering, porting, provisioning) to allow providers to customize their customer journeys, embed its global communications capability into their platforms, and reduce friction to accelerate onboarding. These platforms are global in nature, and they expect a communications partner who can provide direct global coverage and regulatory insight. The company’s leadership in this market continues to expand with its global footprint.

Bandwidth’s toll-free voice solution is a major reason contact center platforms build with Bandwidth for their North American business. Offering 5x carrier redundancy with available hands-free alternative routing, the company’s own toll-free voice network is combined with four additional directly peered toll-free network partners, offering customers greater peace of mind. The company’s four additional peered networks further enable best-in-class coverage as well as resilience—so if one network experiences quality-impacting issues, calls can be routed to a different network seamlessly, before impacts are even felt. Bandwidth’s unique Call Assure solution provides hands-free alternative routing that is fully insulated from the core network to protect against an extraordinary disruption, such as a fire, natural disaster or cyberattack.

Market Offering 2: Programmable Services

The company’s Programmable Services market offering is aimed at B2B2C platforms that use Bandwidth to deliver digital engagement experiences, primarily through its text messaging solutions.

With a significantly higher open rate by end users than email, text messaging has become a business-critical communication channel to reach consumers. The company’s easy-to-use APIs and proven track record for deliverability have made Bandwidth a top choice for many leading platforms in text messaging.

The company’s messaging customers are powering digital engagements across many of the major brands of products people wear, eat, drive, and use every day. Use cases include retail and eCommerce promotions, financial services identity authentication, healthcare patient engagement, and many more. Bandwidth offers a full suite of messaging products, including Application to Person (A2P) messaging solutions supporting both SMS and MMS on Local Numbers (10DLC), Toll Free Numbers, and Short Codes. All its solutions support bi-directional unicode, including emojis.

Bandwidth’s capacity, high deliverability, regulatory know-how and exceptional human-based support has positioned the company as a leading provider for messaging platforms. The company will continue to win high-volume contracts from customers that have run out of capacity with its competitors or who seek the robustness, reliability and resilience of its service.

Market Offering 3: Global Enterprises

Much as the leading platforms in cloud communications have done for years, followed by the messaging leaders in SaaS, Global 2000 enterprises need to accelerate their digital transformations. Bandwidth can help these large enterprises transition from on-premises communications infrastructure to a fully or hybrid cloud-based solution. The company has a dedicated go-to-market focus on enterprises in the Global 2000.

Bandwidth’s history as an enabler to the platform leaders creates additional competitive benefits, such as deep automation of communications services, enterprise-grade quality and support, as well as deep operational relationships with the largest UCaaS and CCaaS platforms.

In 2023, the company launched Bandwidth Maestro (Maestro), a first-of-its-kind, next-generation enterprise cloud communications platform that enables IT customers to solve the key challenge of integrating best-in-class, real-time voice applications across their UCaaS, CCaaS, AI and machine learning platforms. Maestro’s open approach, designed to accommodate technologies developed by third parties, is unique in the cloud communications space. It provides a critical technology bridge that enterprises need to orchestrate a modern customer experience stack without months of costly integration work resulting in faster time to value and enhanced customer and employee experiences and loyalty.

Maestro is a key platform for Bandwidth’s AI innovation strategy. In 2023, Bandwidth launched AIBridge, a solution for Maestro, which enables enterprises to easily deploy voice-based AI tools in their contact centers to resolve calls faster and more efficiently in the communications cloud.

The Bandwidth Communications Cloud

The company provides reliability, scalability, and usage-based control for global business-critical communications.

Automation and Workflow

The Bandwidth Communication Cloud’s command over the company’s own numbering resources enables real-time porting, provisioning and number ordering en masse, and includes:

coverage in more than 65 countries, serving over 90 percent of global GDP;

network platform paired with peering relationships with major global networks ensure its customers are never more than one hop away from the public switched telephone network (PSTN);

5x resilient U.S. toll-free network, with interconnections to four toll-free networks in addition to its own, designed for best-in-class resiliency from a single provider;

public safety connectivity purpose-built for today’s dynamic, increasingly remote workforce, interconnected with emergency calling networks worldwide;

A2P messaging designed to support best-in-class deliverability and insight; and

a broad range of experience with global regulatory frameworks earned through offering communications services in more than 60 countries and territories.

Core Product Domains

Bandwidth is continually investing in new domains in the company’s Communications Cloud. Below are some of the major product offerings and use cases supported:

Voice: The company offers customers the ability to interact with its voice services through SIP or programmable voice API. The company’s voice services are used to build voice calling in applications and platforms, orchestrate call flows between users or machines, record and bridge calls, initiate text-to-speech for interactive voice response and more. Enterprises can customize high-quality call routing for business voice use cases and global reach. Some of the common use cases are:

Powering calling plans within cloud communications platforms (UCaaS, CCaaS, Meetings Solutions): The company’s platform empowers cloud communications leaders to connect their enterprise end-users with local and toll-free connectivity at global scale.

Embedding ‘click-to-call’ Feature: The company enhances its enterprise customers’ ability to connect with consumers instantly. The company’s programmable voice API enables many use cases, including call notifications and surveys, advertising campaigns, etc.

Transitioning from traditional premise focused communications to cloud based services: As enterprises migrate from on-premises equipment to the cloud, Bandwidth can fuel their digital transformation with the company’s software-driven SIP trunking services designed to integrate in hybrid or full cloud deployments.

Messaging API: The company’s software APIs for messaging deliver a full suite of A2P messaging capabilities, designed to help brands engage with their customers. Bandwidth’s North American messaging services are enabled for local and toll-free phone numbers, as well as short codes. While the company provides a wide range of functionalities, some of the common use cases are:

Automated Real-Time Notification and Alerts: The company’s APIs empower product leaders and enterprise developers with predefined functionalities to send and receive A2P messages, uniquely integrated with their own business processes or tech stacks.

Two-Factor Authentication: The company enables enterprises to verify the identity and maintain security of end users through its software-based, multi-channel verification service that sends unique codes to end users to log in to mobile and web applications.

Group Messaging: Product owners utilize the company’s platform to build messaging applications that enable their end-users to share SMS and MMS messages, videos, carry out polls and surveys amongst other uses without leaving the application.

Emergency Services: The company provides complete communications solutions (full PSTN replacement) with integrated local emergency services in 38 countries around the globe. The company can instantly connect numbers, devices or applications to emergency services with reliable and accurate emergency routing.

Dynamic Location Routing: Enables real-time, geocoded routing based on X,Y coordinates of the caller and defined Public Safety Answering Point boundaries. This helps enterprises meet compliance requirements and enable increasingly remote workforces.

Emergency Calling API: Connects apps to the public safety infrastructure without the need for on-premise technology or telephony expertise.

Emergency Notification API: Enables a multi-channel notification sent to on-site security personnel when an emergency call takes place within a large enterprise.

Phone Numbers: The Bandwidth Dashboard is Bandwidth’s user-friendly interface for a comprehensive number management solution. Every function within The Bandwidth Dashboard has an accompanying API, allowing the company’s customers’ product leaders and developers to integrate Bandwidth’s functionality within their own user interfaces or web applications.

Global Number Management: Order, provision, and activate local and toll-free phone numbers around the world, in real-time, allowing customers to search and sort by availability, geographic region, city/state, country/area code and many other options.

Programmatically Port Up To 20,000 Numbers Simultaneously: Gain control over the confusing carrier landscape and automate number porting across all major carriers. This allows for a more reliable end-user experience with controlled scheduling and triggered porting activation.

Insights: Bandwidth Insights gives customers a detailed view of their voice and messaging performance to make data-driven decisions and ensure quality of service.

Understand and Solve for Deliverability Issues: Real-time error codes and alerting allows enterprises to understand and solve for SMS deliverability challenges in an ever-changing text messaging environment.

Real-Time Call Quality Analytics: The company provides its customers with real-time call analytics, including data such as call duration, customer sentiment and other attributes to better understand call performance and customer experience.

Track Trends, Benchmarks and Usage: The company’s Insights API shows trends, delivery rates and usage patterns by product and carrier.

Bring your own carrier (BYOC) with CCaaS and UCaaS Integrations. Bandwidth’s global Communications Cloud integrates with several leading UCaaS and CCaaS platforms under the company’s BYOC solutions portfolio, to provide a holistic solution that’s seamlessly aligned with the organization, and allows enterprises to move communications to the cloud at their own pace. Once numbers are in the Bandwidth Communications Cloud, they can be moved from platform to platform without leaving Bandwidth, decreasing cloud migration risk and complexity.

UCaaS integration for Microsoft Teams: The company has BYOC partnerships with leading CCaaS platforms. The company also has a BYOC offering in the UCaaS space, including for Microsoft Teams. This includes:

Direct Routing and Dynamic E911: Consolidate telephony globally with direct access to the Bandwidth Communications Cloud, and solve for an increasingly dynamic workforce with dynamic location routing for E911 — all from a single, certified provider.

Microsoft Teams Operator Connect: Integrate Bandwidth’s telephony in more than 30 countries through the Microsoft Teams Operator Connect program, enabling the move away from on-premise equipment to cloud-hosted session border controllers and seamless management in the Teams admin portal.

Send-to SMS Web Application: Allows enterprises the ability to send text messages in and outside of the organization from within a user’s Teams environment using the same phone number they use for phone calls, built to work seamlessly with a direct routing or BYOC strategy.

Customers

The company has a broad and diversified customer base. Many of the company’s customers have multi-year contracts, with no single customer representing 10% of total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023.

The majority of the company’s customers sign master service agreements (MSAs) containing standard terms and conditions, including billing and payment, default, termination, limitations of liability, confidentiality, assignment and notification, and other key terms and conditions. Customers order specific services in separate service order forms that incorporate the applicable MSA. Each service order form details the minimum contract duration, any applicable monthly recurring charge and applicable non-recurring charges. The terms and conditions for each order are also specified in the applicable service order form.

Sales and Marketing

The company’s sales and marketing teams are part of a single revenue organization and work closely together to identify and acquire new customers, expand relationships with existing enterprises, and integrate them with the Bandwidth Communications Cloud. The company’s marketing team generates marketing qualified leads and pipeline for sales through a number of demand-generating channels, including its website, marketing campaigns, webinars, sponsored virtual and live events, white papers and blogs, public relations, social media, analyst relations, paid search and search engine optimization and outbound lead development efforts.

The company engages potential customers and existing customers through an enterprise-focused sales approach. The company’s sales and marketing executives often directly engage C-level executives and other senior business, product and technical decision makers responsible for the end-user experience and financial results at their enterprises. The company’s sales and marketing executives work to educate these decision makers and their teams about the benefits of using the Bandwidth Communications Cloud to engage their end-users and deliver exceptional experiences everywhere people live, learn, work and play. The company’s sales team includes a full stack of sales development, inside sales, field sales, revenue enablement and sales engineering functions.

Competition

The company’s competitors include incumbent network operators that offer limited geographical reach and limited developer functionality on top of their networks and physical infrastructure, such as AT&T, Colt, Lumen and Verizon.

Intellectual Property

As of December 31, 2023, the company had 33 U.S. patents and three U.S. patent applications pending. In addition, as of December 31, 2023, the company had 18 registered trademarks and 34 trademark applications pending in the United States and elsewhere.

Regulatory

The company and the communications services that it provides through its Communications Cloud and software APIs are subject to many U.S. federal and state, and foreign, laws and regulations. These laws and regulations govern telecommunications activities, but also govern privacy, data protection, intellectual property, competition, consumer protection, taxation or other subjects. Many of the laws and regulations that apply to the company and the communications services that it provides through its Communications Cloud and software APIs are still evolving and being tested in courts and could be interpreted or applied in ways that could harm its business. The company has obtained FCC authorization to provide services on a facilities and resale basis.

As an international company, the company is subject to communications laws and regulations in the non-US jurisdictions in which it offers its services. These laws and regulations may concern communications, as well as privacy, data protection, intellectual property, competition, consumer protection, taxation or other subjects. In European markets, the company is subject to the European Electronic Communications Code (the Code) and its transposition into the laws of the European Union (EU) and European Economic Area (EEA) countries in which it operates. The Code sets forth the European regulatory framework and harmonized rules across the EU and EEA, which govern the provision of electronic communications networks and services. While the Code provides a harmonized framework, laws of each jurisdiction of the EU and the EEA, and related regulations, will differ from country to country. For example, rules around suballocation of numbering resources differ from country to country.

History

The company was founded in 1999. It was incorporated in Delaware in 2001. The company was formerly known as Bandwidth.com, Inc. and changed its name to Bandwidth Inc. in 2017.