Pamela Clark-Dickson, senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, commented: “We forecast that global SMS revenues will continue to rise from US$114.9 billion in 2011 to US$135.6 billion in 2016 (Informa Telecoms & Media, December 2011). In particular, we see application-related messaging revenues growing at twice the rate of those for person-to-person messaging. This makes sense, due to a number of unique advantages that SMS offers: it reaches all mobile consumers, even in regions with low smartphone/3G penetration, and it provides a predictable user experience. Enterprise messaging will therefore represent a significant growth opportunity for mobile operators in the future.”
Jorgen Nilsson, Chief Executive at Acision: “We are proud of this formal confirmation of our leadership position and delighted to be officially recognised as continuing to be at the forefront of what remains one of the highest revenue-generating sectors of the mobile industry.
Since the day the first SMS was sent 19 years ago, Acision has enabled mobile operators around the globe to build the text messaging opportunity into a substantial business by providing mission-critical software, risk-free integration and migration capabilities that made it a high value service for consumer. The reliability and ubiquity of SMS has led to it becoming a part of daily life for over five billion global mobile users, irrespective of their device or network. As IP capabilities and broadband capacities become available in mobile networks worldwide, Acision is building on its heritage, expertise, innovation and market leadership by taking messaging to the next level, helping operators to strengthen their competitive position through IP communication services.
This is being achieved in a number of ways: firstly, Acision is enabling differentiation and new revenue streams for mobile operators through a range of premium and personalised messaging services for consumers and enterprises. Acision’s open architecture and cloud-based delivery capability enables time-efficient and cost-effective introduction of messaging services such as Group Messaging, Parental Control and Advanced Notifications.
Additionally, through tight integration of enterprise applications with the global message delivery infrastructure, Acision is creating new revenue opportunities for operators and enterprises alike, across mobile marketing, customer services and employee communications, providing unprecedented levels of control and transparency in message delivery previously not possible.
Acision is also introducing rich communication services such as group chat, status and media sharing to the operator offering. By combining these rich capabilities and the established operator assets of consumer trust and interoperability with the global SMS user base, mobile operators have a unique service proposition to consumers and enterprises. A critical success factor will be the continuity of existing messaging services by enabling SMS for IP users while also ensuring that existing SMS-based applications and personalised features are applied to the new rich communication services.
“2012 promises to be another exciting year for the messaging market and we expect to see strong traction in two key areas. Firstly, global messaging volumes and revenues will continue to grow, with new innovations in personalised messaging, enterprise messaging and rich communication services creating revenue growth for mobile operators in the new world of ‘OTT’ messaging services. Secondly, cloud will become an increasingly important delivery platform for the operator community. The use of cloud-based services will enable operators to launch and test new services quickly for consumers and enterprises, with minimum expenditure and investment and allow them to increase customer stickiness and initiate new revenue streams,” continued Nilsson.