Normally, each year in the dead of winter, I publish a predictions article about the coming year. Earlier this year, we published my 12th consecutive predictions for the mobile industry. However, today, I would like to dust off the crystal ball and push it a little bit further into the future to look at how the messaging industry might evolve over the coming five to 10 years.
Category Archive: SMS
In the mobile industry, 2018 certainly did not disappoint in terms of trending activity. The T-Mobile acquisition of Sprint (still pending as of this writing), 5G, IoT, rich communications services (RCS), and network neutrality were dominant themes throughout the year.
One thing that we constantly see is that businesses are clamoring to include mobile messaging as part of their consumer outreach. As has been stated many times, many places, an SMS message is typically read within the first few minutes of receipt, by over 90% of the recipients. That includes Person-to-Person (or P2P) as well as Application-to-Person (or A2P). To reach consumers and encourage them to engage, businesses are increasingly turning to mobile messaging as their primary channel.
In late July 2016, there were a significant number of news stories that have “declared the end of 2FA over SMS,” as the US NIST has recommended that the Out-of-Band delivery channel of SMS for 2FA tokens to be deprecated in the next version of their guidelines.
This is a piece about mobile messaging – SMS to be precise. Remember SMS, that mobile messaging medium that has been decimated by non-SMS chat applications like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and many others? Well, it is still very much around, live and well and, I’ll say it: prospering.
Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the record-breaking annual get-together of over 108,000 attendees in Barcelona, Spain, interested in mobile, 5G, connected cars, devices, augmented reality, virtual reality, cloud computing, IoT, and much, much more. As I do most years, I attended (I believe this might have been my ninth). MWC is the most important event for the mobile-focused industry. This year, the theme was “Mobile: The Next Element.” The idea of this theme was to “reflect the elemental role of mobile in the lives of billions of people around the world.” While I was quite busy with over 15 meetings and discussions in our massive (and popular) SAP stand, I was able to walk around occasionally during the 4 days to try to get a better understanding of this year’s major themes.
Over the past few years interesting phenomena has been occurring in the United States as well as Canada. Consumers continue to text each other (called Person-to-Person or P2P); however, unlike in many other regions such as Asia-Pacific and Europe, they continue to use SMS at rates not enjoyed in these other regions for several years.
Worldwide, SMS-based mobile messaging continues to evolve and innovate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in A2P or enterprise messaging. Numerous analysts have forecast that enterprise messaging (or A2P messaging as it is sometimes called) will continue growth and prominence through at least the rest of this decade. Why is this?
Ok, this is definitely a late 2016 predictions article – especially since it is the week after Mobile World Congress 2016. But, in my defense, not THAT much happens until after MWC, so maybe I’m not cheating so much. This is my ninth (yes 9th!) annual prediction blog posting.
Here we go once again: another 2015 prediction article. This is my 8th annual predictions blog posting and I can say it never has been more difficult to prognosticate on where this industry is headed. Mobile in the context of an operating environment has never been more important to consumers and businesses, worldwide. Today, if a business or enterprise does not include mobile engagement as a priority, then I believe they are behind before they even begin.
Mobility, Messaging, and More 