Next Generation Services Now

Messaging Modes Converge in New Interactive Age

On any given day, billions of text messages are transmitted by subscribers in China. It is estimated that over half a trillion messages were sent worldwide in 2004. The world has arrived at this new interactive age and messaging is leading the charge.

What began as a one dimensional, text-driven short message service (SMS) is quickly blossoming into instant multimedia messaging service (MMS) combining text with images, video and audio. Unified messaging service (UMS) adds another layer of communications that gives subscribers a variety of options of how and when to access content.

Today, these messaging mediums are converging on the screen of a handset, transforming this little device into a powerful portal for a variety of instant communications while giving subscribers a true mutlimodal experience.

A More Perfect Union
The marriage of voice, e-mail, text, video and multimedia is a natural alliance to satisfy the communication needs of the mobile workforce and consumers alike. The success and growth of voice-mail shows that messaging – SMS, MMS and UMS – is and will be one of the most lucrative mobile services to increase ARPU and reduce subscriber churn.

According to Ovum and Juniper, mobile data revenues will reach $218 billion in 2007 with messaging representing approximately 80 percent.

“Messaging is a clear business case and key revenue generator for both wireless and wireline carriers,” says Nitin Patel, Telenity director, marketing and business development. “However, it is of little value if subscribers of different networks cannot easily share their content with one another.

“One of the main hurdles the industry is addressing is interoperability,” explains Patel. “All of the Telenity Canvas messaging products, including Multimedia Messaging Service Center (MMSC), Short Message Service Center (SMSC) and Unified Messaging System (UMS), address this issue and work seamlessly across different network technologies. They are based on an open architecture supporting open standards. Network operators can scale their services up or down as they wish because the Canvas design is fully distributed across all its products, and it is fully modular.”

Azercell put that scalability to work when it deployed the Canvas messaging products.

“Canvas MMSC brings a new level of finesse to scalability, service development and content provisioning, and does so in a collaborative way,” says Serdar Canogullari, general manager at Azercell. “This makes the network very attractive to application service providers and application developers. At the same time, it ensures that we can choose to create our own services, work in collaboration with others, or even resell services, all of which can increase revenues so the investment made in the next generation network can be justified.”

Blending technologies from an operations perspective is one feat easily surmounted by the Canvas suite of products. Spurring revenue creation with multimedia and multimodal applications and services is another. The youth market that enthusiastically embraced text messaging is now an early adopter of multimedia messaging..

The Gartner group estimates that in Europe alone sales of camera phones in 2004 will reach 150 million units, just over a quarter of all mobile handset sales. Add to that services like Canvas PFS, People Finder Service, where subscribers can locate friends in their current vicinity and exchange messages with maps, movie trailers, city hotspot information instantaneously and it's easy to see that messaging is a dynamic, multisensory, multimode approach to increased revenue.

Today, many carriers maintain separate platforms for each messaging service. Canvas UMS solves this problem. It bridges different messaging services by supporting the storage and delivery of voice, fax, SMS, MMS, e-mail and video-mail in a single mailbox using an IP multimedia store. It provides a common user interface across all services, making user experience seamless and intuitive.

When Timing is Right
Time is money in every business. In the competitive communications sphere, time to market and cost of deploying new services are largely dependent on the flexibility and versatility of the operating platform. Built upon open APIs, Canvas messaging applications provide toolkits for in-house and third-party developers facilitating rapid service creation and reducing development costs.

Network integration is another key component to this operating efficiency. All Canvas messaging applications share common tools for management, maintenance and provisioning that are easily integrated into existing networks.

Through Canvas products, new revenue-generating services can be developed, validated and deployed commercially quickly and effectively saving valuable operational and capital resources by building on a shared infrastructure for all services. Such a message is always relevant.