Friday 6 June 2008

SMS Home Routing, let's have a discussion before it's too late

In my interview with Informa yesterday we discussed among many things was SMS Home Routing and that, in my opinion, it represents one of the biggest threats and at the same time biggest opportunities for our industry. What I was concerned about was no one had mentioned this to the journalist before, a specialist in the mobile messaging arena.

A while ago I added a Google Alert for the term to keep me up to date with discussions, nothing. Absolutely nothing has come through. I imagined that in the vast expanse of the Internet, there would be someone who was worried about this or at least might have mentioned it.

Ewan at SMSTextNews has posted a couple of pieces (Verizon’s banning of abortion discussion highlights home routing issues, The arse with SMS home routing) about this (he's not in favour, can you tell? ;-)) but the comments have petered out.

I'm perplexed as to why industry figures like Mike Short, Andrew Bud, et al. are not leading a discussion into this. Why doesn't the MDA have an opinion?

I firmly believe that if SMS Home Routing destroys the validity of a delivery receipts, enterprises are going to walk away from SMS at a time when they're just starting to embrace it. It doesn't have to be this way, we just need some transparency from the operators.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

homerouting is actually the next natural step in sms evolution. without it operators cannot deliver innovative next generation services.

the reality is messaging will not be a reliable revenue stream so operators will be forced to seek other ways to profit from the service. homerouting will deliver a convergance of service sms has been missing.

maybe the attention should be focused on vendors who do a half arsed job and impliment homerouting poorly - these are the people who are going to ruin it for the 3rd parties.

Just out of interest, if it was such a major design issue, you should examine how mms evolved to be exactly like this!

would be happy to discuss ur thoughts on it though.. ask ewan about his messaging god contact ;)

Adam said...

I agree that home routing represents a huge opportunity to deliver a wealth of new services around SMS but my concern is that in the race for these, one of the key facets of the SMS success story could get lost.

Vendors are responsible but so are networks, and it is them ultimately that will miss out on revenue should enterprise customers not embrace SMS integrated witht heir business processes.

Yes MMS was architected in a similar way but it a) hasn't been a wild success and b) isn't something I've seen a compelling business case for lots of enterprises. While this is not necessarily down to the deliver model it could be send that vendor differences caused a lot of the issues with it's adoption.

I'm not against home routing per se, but I am concerned that without proper thought and guidelines it could end up ruining an opportunity.

Adam said...

Forgot to say, keen to continue conversation, do drop me an email adam.bird(at)esendex.com.