Far from being a mature technology, SMS is still in the "cave-painting" stages, according to Giri Ramachandran, head of alliances and market development for Telstra wireless data and solutions.

Wireless data is the fastest growing revenue base for Telstra, according to Ramachandran, and SMS - which has been predicted to take a back seat to newer technologies such as GPRS and MMS - is still helping to drive the growth.

"SMS is still the star revenue performer," Ramachandran told ZDNet Australia at the Microsoft Australian and New Zealand Partner Conference 2003. "If you look at how SMS began it was centred around the youth market. It's now moving upstream into small and medium businesses."

Business are beginning to integrate SMS technology into their enterprises, the latest popular example of this being Australian Idol, where Australians used SMS to vote on which wanna-be celebrities they wished to be subjected to over the next few months.

Telstra sees the maturing of SMS as tied to the integration of the technology into other communication platforms. Large enterprises are beginning to see the benefits of being able to send SMS messages from their desktop, and Telstra is investing a lot of money in that area, according to Ramachandran. The goal now is to integrate SMS technology with e-mail clients and other messaging clients on the desktop.

"SMS is here to stay for some time," said Ramachandran. "It is not something that is maturing, [we're still] identifying new markets." Ramachandran predicts a time when you will write a message to someone on your desktop, and when you send it the system will prompt you for which technology to send the message with.

Telstra has previously indicated its displeasure with the fact that SMS accounted for 90 percent of wireless data revenue, and said it would take steps to reduce this figure. To this end Telstra is putting weight behind Blackberry devices, which allow users to have their e-mails pushed out to them on the move, and which Ramachandran described as the "other main winner." Telstra has sold the devices to 250 large enterprises since they were launched in Australia.

The telecommunications behemoth has also connected over 1,000 business IT systems to their wireless network in 2002/03. Telstra sees the key to the success of wireless deployment as resulting from fixed costs for data. For example, the Telstra Wireless PC pack includes 50 hours of access per month for AU$150, and the card will connect to either the CDMA 1x network or a Telstra wireless hotspot, depending on what spectrum is available at the time.

For their smartphone and PDA devices, Telstra has instituted an "all-you-can-eat" system ranging from AU$95 per month to AU$120 per month. This is intended to simplify the job of solutions developers who wish to use Telstra products to enable their own solutions to customers.

"At some point the customer is going to ask 'how much is this data going to cost me?'", said Ramachandran. "You take away that variable [and give them a fixed price], it gives that cost stability to customers."

"We see partners as the integral part, because we don't provide the deep-end solutions," said Ramachandran. He said wireless data is about increasing productivity in workers' lives, and services that increase productivity are normally well received by industry.

James Pearce is attending the conference courtesy of Microsoft.

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