If the second wave of the Internet was all about mobile, then the third wave is the Internet of Things (IoT), which includes billions of new sensors and devices connected to the global network. An in-depth discussion of IoT could take up volumes. This discussion will instead focus on how the growth of IoT will affect companies involved in Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging in various verticals.
Need for A2P SMS messaging
IoT devices and the need to communicate via SMS messaging technologies will become more widespread. Another estimate is that, 5.5 million “new things” are to be connected to the internet by end of 2016. Many of these “new things” will be sending notifications and/or alerts. There are two primary global drivers for this A2P market. The first driver is the increasing mobile subscriber base. The number of mobile connections approached 7.5 billion as of 1Q16 – one of the key uses was the SMS embedded in the mobile device. The second driver is the forecasted 6.4 billion connected things to be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015.
To make this more relevant, connected things and A2P communication through the internet might impact your life someday. Imagine a fire detector in your office, it uses its sensors to identify a fire and it uses an application to alert a centralized monitoring service- a fire in progress. SMS messages are sent to all mobile phones in the building. The SMS Message might contain information about the temperature and any evacuation instructions. Visualizing this situation provides a good basic understanding of the effectiveness of A2P SMS messaging. In addition, the sender can use keywords to set up response options, such as “Safe” or “Help”. The enterprise SMS service forwards incoming replies directly back to the business application, so the replies can be tagged automatically in the system according to the keyword to take immediate action.
High compatibility of A2P SMS Services
Retarus SMS Services for IoT messaging can provide virtually unlimited capacity to send and receive A2P SMS messages. Numerous APIs are supported to integrate the SMS service easily in any of your business application such as a CRM system. The web-based Enterprise Administration Services (EAS) portal provides convenient administration of these SMS services, as well as, detailed SMS reporting. The Retarus EAS portal provides one-of-a-kind process transparency in today’s market. Retarus offers its messaging services to a large number of financial institutions, health organizations and insurance companies, personnel services as well as educational institutions.
