When a single US phone company, Verizon reports that in one month, they were responsible for sending 10 billion text messages, you may want to stand up and take notice.
In order to learn more about the SMS space I decided to take a trip down to Plano, Texas where the UK-based Acision has one of it’s four US offices. The company was formerly named Logica CMG and is one of those companies most people never heard of but is responsible for providing technology many of us frequently use.
In short, the company is an enabler of various types of service provider messaging from SMS to voice and video. This month in fact the company celebrated it’s 15th anniversary of supplying the industry with Short Message Service Centers or SMSCs.
Thanks to Moore’s law and clever design, the capability of Acision’s SMSCs has dramatically increased over the years. In 1992 SMSC version 1.0 had a capacity of 10 messages per second. Today a single rack of the IP-based SMSC can handle 16,000 messages per second with the ability to grow to “virtually” unlimited levels according to the company.
My conversation in Texas was with Oswin Eleonara the Senior Vice President (you can call him “Oz”). Oz tells me his company allows 300 clients to serve a billion customers and while they have been focusing on the burgeoning international SMS market in years past, they see tremendous potential for US messaging growth and will redouble their efforts on these shores.
The company does more than messaging and recently has gotten in the market of real-time behavioral analysis and predictive analysis allowing service providers and advertising companies to determine how best to serve a target audience with ads. The system also consists of a marketing dashboard and has the ability to determine which group of people is most likely to buy specific offers sent via specific media methods.
Acision also has a speed browsing application which allows browsing at speeds 70x greater than today according to Oz. The company also plays in the rating, intelligent charging and content enablement spaces.
Acision wants to continue helping service providers roll out the latest and greatest services and they are financially incented to do so as they have positioned themselves nicely as an arms dealer in the mobile messaging and advertising space. It will be interesting to see how the mobile services market evolves and how Acision helps mobile carriers generate revenue from next-generation services.
