From platform to ecosystem: How Infobip scales through partnerships
Veselin Vukovic has led Infobip’s partner program since 2020. Here, he explains why co-creation, not resale, defines the next phase of growth.
For most of our first decade, growth had a clear shape. Open a market, hire a team, stay close to the customer. That model took us from a small town in Croatia to physical presence in key markets worldwide, processing billions of transactions a day.
By 2019, the product had expanded well beyond messaging, and it became clear that direct sales alone would only take the company so far. Veselin Vukovic has been part of that journey since 2010. He spent his first seven years leading direct sales and business development. Then, in 2020, he moved to lead Infobip’s partner program when it launched.
You can’t cover everything on your own
The insight that drove the partner program was not about reaching new geographies or filling gaps in sales coverage. It came from a different reality. Customer needs kept growing, every day they asked for more. More automation, more integration, more industry-specific capability.
We understood that we would have hard times covering all the customer needs that are ever-growing on a daily basis. That’s why we need an ecosystem. Technology partners, ISV integration partners, but also solution partners who can implement and innovate on top of our platform.
Veselin Vukovic
Chief Alliances Officer, Infobip
Partners brought deep knowledge of specific industries and customer types that complemented what we built. Working alongside them, customers got solutions that fit their world.
The platform that makes it possible
In 2020 we launched our first SaaS products, and that raised a new question. What could partners actually build with them?
The answer depended on how open the platform was. In this context, openness means the ability for a partner to take individual modules, combine them, and configure something that fits a customer’s industry, size, or workflow, without being locked into a fixed product.
From a product perspective, what makes Infobip partnerships strategic is the openness of our platform. Every day our product and engineering teams work on creating a platform that is composable, open for co-creation for our partners. You can build custom, bespoke solutions for any customer size or industry using the modules and elements of the platform that are relevant for that solution.
Veselin Vukovic
Chief Alliances Officer, Infobip
A partner building on Infobip adds their own expertise and knowledge to the equation. What the customer gets is a solution built by people who already understand their business.
Growth that comes from building together
Through our integrations, technology partnerships, and hyperscaler partnerships, we are able to create what Vukovic calls ecosystem growth. We connect our products into the AI infrastructure that hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS have invested heavily in, then co-innovate on top of it.
At the industry level, systems integrators and ISVs bring years of experience inside specific verticals. They know the regulations, the workflows, the customer expectations, and the shortcuts that only come from years of working in one space. When they build on our platform, they’re not starting from scratch. They’re taking what they already know about their industry and wrapping it around the platform’s capabilities.
More and more partners are aware that a pure resale motion is not enough in today’s world. All our partners create their own IP and build on top of other technology platforms. Our ambition is to become that platform, from both a technology and a co-creation perspective.
Veselin Vukovic
Chief Alliances Officer, Infobip
The program grows with the ecosystem. More of our new business, cross-sells, and upsells are now generated or influenced by partners than at any point in our history. And that number is still growing.
We aspire to be a company that is easy to work with, human, collaborative. We run joint events with partners, not for the optics, but to work through what customers actually need and what it would take to build it together.
The partnerships that will define the next phase are the ones focused on solutions that create impactful outcomes for the customer.
Veselin Vukovic
Chief Alliances Officer, Infobip
Twenty years in, that is still the measure that matters most.
Explore Infobip’s partner program
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