ITTech Pulse Exclusive Interview with Miguel Turnbull Director of Partner Development Infobip

Welcome to ITTech Pulse! Today, we chat with Miguel Turnbull, a cloud communications expert with 10+ years’ experience, who expanded Infobip in Africa and built its global partner network with Microsoft, Oracle, and AWS.

What first sparked your passion for global partnerships and communications technology, and how did that early inspiration shape your career journey leading to your current role as Senior Director of Global Partnerships at Infobip?

To be quite honest, before starting my career at Infobip I didn’t give much thought to communication technology and its business use. For me, messaging was something you’d do with family and friends. Coming into Infobip opened a complex and effervescent world to me. With the raise of digital channels and conversational customer engagement, this type of technology became, suddenly, at the center of the digital transformation, and we’ve seen many traditional Martech, CRM, Contact Center, software providers, in the need to add this type of capability into their offering. This is where I found myself thinking that it would be very difficult for any company to build this capability from scratch and the easiest and fastest way for customers to take advantage of these technologies would be through strategic partnerships between service providers that could complement software developers.

Having worked in the dynamic field of cloud communications, what aspects of building strategic partnerships energize you most, and how do you see partnerships as a catalyst for innovation in today’s digital landscape?

The Co-creation aspect of strategic partnerships is what keeps me coming to new projects with the same drive and aspiration. It’s the moment when, together, 2 or more companies look into their strengths and gaps and come up with joint solutions that result in a concrete, measurable, net positive. Cloud communications have a very unique and practical side. We have seen this very real impact during the height of Covid where the ability to communicate at a distance became ever more relevant. Many of the most exciting partnerships I’ve worked on happened during that time and were born out of the necessity to innovate at a very high speed.

The AI revolution era is again being a catalyst for innovation through partnerships. Every day we hear news of how companies are partnering to develop new AI models or how Agentic AI is creating a completely new marketplace of integration between technology providers.

As Senior Director of Global Partnerships at Infobip, you’ve been instrumental in forging relationships with major technology giants. What’s your philosophy when it comes to identifying and nurturing partnerships that create genuine value for customers rather than just business deals?

2 things make partnerships that really generate valuable outcomes: a shared view and technological complementarities. It’s fundamental that both companies have a common vision of outcomes and of the impact they want to achieve with their joint customers.  At Infobip, we’re very insistent in the centrality of the customer experience and we approach partnerships with the same mindset.

Let’s talk about the recent Infobip-Oracle integration that directly integrates WhatsApp and SMS messaging with Oracle Fusion Cloud Service. Can you walk us through how this partnership came to life and what makes this integration unique in the cloud communications landscape?

Infobip and Oracle have a long-standing global partnership featuring numerous successful integrations within Oracle’s platform ecosystem. Our latest collaboration co-develops a direct integration of Infobip’s WhatsApp and SMS channels into Oracle Fusion Cloud Service, enabling native workflows without external connectors. This unique direct API connection allows customers to effortlessly trigger and manage conversations within Oracle’s environment while benefiting from Infobip’s extensive global CPaaS scale. The integration combines Oracle’s robust customer experience ecosystem with Infobip’s omnichannel capabilities and enterprise-grade reliability, delivering enhanced communication solutions for businesses.

This integration uses Oracle’s embedded AI for high-volume interactions with seamless agent escalation. From your partnerships perspective, how do you see AI-driven communication channels reshaping customer engagement across industries?

 Infobip’s integration connects channels like WhatsApp and SMS directly to Oracle’s AI agents, maintaining a seamless escalation path to live contact center agents. This enables businesses to scale self-service through conversational AI, instantly resolving most routine requests. When escalation is necessary, the context is preserved and smoothly transferred to a live agent in Fusion Service, ensuring a continuous, end-to-end customer journey. Across industries, this approach balances efficiency by automating high-volume interactions with empathy by empowering agents to intervene at the right moment, fully informed. Together, this integration sets a new standard for customer engagement by combining AI-powered self-service with human expertise.

Looking ahead, as customer expectations continue to evolve toward immediate, personalized interactions across multiple channels, what role do you believe strategic partnerships will play in meeting these demands, and where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation?

Customers are becoming, rightly so, more demanding when it comes to the experience they get while accessing any type of service. With hyper-personalization at the core of those expectations, businesses need to be able to act fast to a growing demand. They need to be able to engage each customer with the right data, at the right time, over the right channel. The complexity and the fast pace at which change in demand happens mean that only through partnerships can companies keep up with providing the best service to their customers.

At Infobip we’re seeing a great acceleration of partnerships around AI. We have been working on growing our AI offering through partnering with different companies in that space, seeking to provide the best AI features for our customers while shortening the time to market of those developments. Similarly, we have been focusing on adding our capability to different AI marketplaces, of which Oracle Fusion Cloud is an example.

As we have started, it means we need to end before we wrap up our conversation. What advice would you give to other partnership leaders who are trying to build meaningful collaborations in the fast-evolving cloud communications industry, especially when working with enterprise giants like Oracle?

Building meaningful partnerships with enterprise leaders like Oracle requires patience — it’s always a long-term play. Focus on how your solutions complement and enhance their existing products, making them more valuable and differentiated for their customers. Invest time in understanding their product roadmap and aligning your value proposition accordingly. Strong, trust-based relationships with both Product and GTM teams are critical to driving mutual success. Ultimately, sustainable partnerships are built on shared outcomes, not short-term wins.

Thank you, Mr. Miguel, for sharing your insights with us.

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