Cloud API platform for voice, SMS, and real-time communications (2009 - 2015, acquired by Cisco)
This organization is archived. The repositories here are preserved for historical reference only and are no longer maintained.
Tropo was a cloud communications platform that let developers add phone and SMS capabilities to their applications using the web technologies they already knew. Before Tropo, building voice applications often meant learning VoiceXML. Tropo opened that world to web developers by letting them write communication apps in familiar languages and deploy them without managing telephony infrastructure.
Supported languages and approaches
- Groovy, Ruby, PHP, Python, and JavaScript scripting
- A WebAPI that exchanged HTTP and JSON with an application running on your own server
- Voice, SMS, and other real-time communication channels delivered through a single cloud platform
At the time of its acquisition, Tropo reported more than 200,000 developers on the platform, with telco and enterprise partners that included Deutsche Telekom and IBM.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2009 | Tropo is founded and based in Menlo Park, California. Founders listed publicly include Jason Goecke, Jonathan Taylor, Jose de Castro, and RJ Burnham. |
| 2009 - 2015 | The platform grows into a developer-focused alternative in the cloud communications (CPaaS) market, with a free development tier and usage-based pricing in production. |
| May 2015 | Cisco announces its intent to acquire Tropo (May 7, 2015) and completes the acquisition later that month. Terms were not disclosed. |
| 2015 onward | The Tropo team joins Cisco's Collaboration Technology Group under Rowan Trollope, with the goal of extending Cisco's collaboration products to third-party apps through modern APIs. |
| Later | Tropo stops accepting new customers, and its developer focus folds into Cisco Spark for Developers, which later became Webex for Developers. |
Cisco described the deal as a way to give customers and developers a collaboration platform-as-a-service for creating new communications services with minimal development effort. It was Cisco's first move into the CPaaS space.
This organization holds open source libraries, SDKs, samples, and tooling that the Tropo team and community published over the years.
This organization is being archived. Repositories are read-only. If you depend on any of this code, please fork it.
For current Cisco developer resources, see Webex for Developers.
Thanks to everyone who built, used, and contributed to Tropo: the engineers, designers, support and community teams, partners, and the developers who built applications on the platform.
- Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Tropo (Cisco Blogs, May 2015)
- Cisco acquires cloud comms platform provider Tropo (SiliconANGLE, May 2015)
- Cisco Tropo: Dead or Alive? (UC Today)
- Tropo on Crunchbase
