Soprano Design says it’s time for IP over SMS
Sydney-based mobile messaging specialist Soprano Design has announced a new platform to deliver IP-enabled features via SMS, SOPRANO GAMMA.
“One of the central challenges for enterprise mobile messaging isn’t to replace SMS, but to find a way to provide a feature-packed, multimedia and secure IP-enabled experience without excluding those users who have to use SMS,” said Horden Wiltshire, chief executive officer of Soprano Design.
“SOPRANO GAMMA helps businesses make an orderly transition from SMS to a rich multimedia IP-based messaging experience without sacrificing the reach that only SMS provides.
“To our knowledge, we are the only company to offer this unique combination of platform, security features and IP/SMS integration.”
SOPRANO GAMMA also provides features such as read acknowledgement and auditability that are critical to business users.
Several large enterprise customer trials of SOPRANO GAMMA now are underway in Australia and Europe, Wiltshire said, and the company plans to announce its first customers before the end of the year.
Soprano also plans to leverage a unique distribution model for the product. Through its mobile network operator distribution partners, including Telstra in Australia, Soprano today has access to 75 percent of the Global Fortune 1000 in industries such as transportation, logistics, financial, healthcare, education, construction and government.
The consumer market for mobile messaging applications is white-hot, illustrated by Facebook’s recent $22 billion acquisition of WhatsApp. However, consumer-focused, mobile messaging apps have failed to gain traction in the lucrative business market because they fall short of the necessary compliance, security, integration and performance capabilities required for most business use cases.
Perhaps more importantly, they cannot reach offline users with the type of immediacy that SMS can. This last-mile coverage is paramount to business productivity.
“The B2B messaging market is ripe for disruption, but it won’t be led by the ‘free’ apps such as WhatsApp that don’t meet the specific needs of the business market,” Wiltshire said. “We believe SOPRANO GAMMA is the killer solution that will unlock new use cases for business.”
The B2B mobile messaging space is already a $50 billion market, primarily comprising SMS revenue, and Jupiter Research estimates it will grow to $70.1 billion by 2016 as the market shifts to IP messaging. Its growth will be driven by everyday B2C uses such as SMS password verifications, package delivery alerts, consumer loyalty programs and a myriad of internal B2B productivity uses of SMS.