The Australian SMS market is set to explode away from its traditional consumer market as enterprise customers start using the technology for application messaging. Local company Whitesmiths will announce today its plans to distribute Empower Interactive's Applications Messaging Service Centre (AMSC) within Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia.
ZDNet Australia spoke to John O'Brien, managing director of Whitesmiths Australia. According to O'Brien, Australian mobile carriers expect that application-based SMS should account for around 20 percent of total mobile revenue within the next two years, which somewhat mirrors a Merrill Lynch report that sees application messaging as accounting for more than half of the worldwide market by 2005.
Application messaging is currently something that can be done with existing technology based around the Short Message Peer to Peer (SMPP) protocol. "The problem with SMS is that SMPP isn't simple; it's a telephony based standard. The AMSC is designed to allow enterprises to use IP standards like HTTP or SOAP to communicate between devices without needing to know SMPP."
"The AMSC essentially makes it simple for enterprises to integrate SMS applications messaging according to their needs", said O'Brien. He used the example of field force management, where individual jobs and job directions could be SMSed to workers with a guarantee of delivery. The benefits over performing similar tasks with a PDA/GSM solution, according to O'Brien, lay in the lower cost of individual SMS messages over a continuous ISP data connection.
The AMSC also makes cross-carrier applications messaging possible for enterprises, something that could be a considerable time and money saver. O'Brien used the example of Telstra's popular "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" SMS game, which is currently only available to Telstra subscribers; with the AMSC, according to O'Brien, this would no longer be a technological limiting factor.
Empower's AMSC platform, which was recently launched in Singapore, is capable of handling over 1,000 application messages per second and hosting over 250,000 different applications.
O'Brien didn't comment on any existing partnerships or particular plans for the product in terms of customers. Whitesmiths has had a close working relationship with Optus Communications, and O'Brien did note that they may be a potential customer. Pricing for the platform was highly dependent on exact customer needs, O'Brien said.
While the mobile messaging market may be expanding, with that expansion does come some risks; mobile phones are very easy to lose or steal. O'Brien did admit that there was potential for data loss. "It's like having your notebook stolen, really", he said. Although the AMSC has no particular inbuilt encryption options, he commented that "the best thing to do in that situation would be to delete your SMS messages on a regular basis."
