Acision's Predictions for 2012

2011 was another year of diversity for the mobile industry. With a raft of new smart devices, tablets, applications, services and new pricing plans, consumers and enterprises alike have had more choice than ever when making use of the mobile device.

So what will 2012 hold? Every day this week, Acision, a global leader mobile messaging services, will outline its predictions for the mobile ecosystem in 2012, spotlighting a range of business and technology developments expected to be driven by messaging. Today’s prediction provides an insight into messaging in 2012.

Litmus Test for New Messaging Services

Acision believes that the coming year will be the ‘litmus test’ for over-the-top messaging services, all battling to compete in a fragmented market. However, global text messaging volumes are expected to continue to grow next year, from the 4.2 billion SMS users today to over 5 billion users and 8 trillion messages. This growth will be driven by new innovations in trusted messaging applications, personalized messaging and rich communication services. While 2011 saw many new players emerge on the messaging scene -- including Apple’s iMessage, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp -- SMS will still be king! One major reason: in the very fragmented messaging market, SMS is the only ubiquitous channel working across any brand, network and device type, even without 3G.

However, will these new messaging services truly challenge the ubiquity and reliability of SMS when more than 80 percent of mobile users already use SMS on their phones and over-the-top (OTT) service can only reach the those with mobile broadband that have downloaded a messaging app?
 
“There are so many messaging services on the market at the moment that the average consumer will likely use two or three different services to communicate, in addition to social networks – and this is clearly unsustainable.” said Tom Veldman, Director Product Marketing, Acision. There is still a disparity between the capabilities of OTT messaging services and SMS. However, we predict that the gap will narrow next year with the launch of new operator services such as RCS-e, a messaging solution endorsed by the industry and designed to deliver a more personalized and relevant communications experience alongside SMS. Also, as Facebook Messenger and iMessage continue to grow, SMS will remain the backbone, allowing interoperability across platforms, devices and networks.”