Bringing about a better quality of SMS

April 23rd, 2008 - London, UK: The rise of SMS in the enterprise is a well documented phenomenon, with firms increasingly using SMS as a low-cost, high speed tool for internal communications, customer marketing and mission critical alerting. However, the industry has yet to reach its full potential and this, in part, is the result of failure on behalf of the SMS industry to recognise the requirements of the enterprise IT buyer.

Enterprise SMS
Enterprise SMS can be used in a wide range of industries, from airlines and logistics through to the finance sector and health care. Any business that has a requirement for mobile communications, whether because of a mobile or geographically dispersed workforce, can benefit from SMS, both in terms of is convenience and reach and also in reduced costs versus proprietary mobile messages technologies or even mobile phone calls. In addition, increasingly specialised applications are driving SMS usage by business. For example, in the banking sector SMS is more and more being adopted to act as part of online banking security – being used to send one time passwords to customers as they log onto their online bank accounts.

Customer concerns
However, the widespread adoption of SMS in business has, so far, been held back by a range of perceived issues with the technology on behalf of the corporate IT buyer. Generally seen as a consumer technology, business users of SMS have concerns around areas such as security, confidentiality, reliability and speed. For example, they need to know whether a message will be stored on third party servers as part of its transit, whether it has been delivered and how fast it has been delivered. These perceived issues with SMS have now been solved by some specialist suppliers but the problem remains that buyers have these worries at the front of their minds.

SLA’s
The answer to this problem of perception lies in service level agreements (SLA’s). Long the standard in the world of enterprise IT, SLA’s set out the service parameters in which a solution is guaranteed to perform. In the world of the web, for example, it might define service uptime or server response time. Whatever parameters are important to the purchasing business can be defined in an SLA and failure by the supplier to meet the terms of that SLA can be counted as breach of contract and punishable by financial penalties.

The introduction of SLA’s would have a range of beneficial implications for the enterprise SMS world. First and foremost, they would enable businesses to adopt the technology secure in the knowledge that it can offer the capabilities they are looking for in a mobile messaging solution. If an enterprise SMS SLA can guarantee a certain level of platform uptime, delivery speed and reliability, SMS volume and fault fix times, a purchasing company can base a mission critical service on it in the knowledge that it will deliver as promised. By removing the perceived worries that have prevented the widespread adoption of enterprise SMS, the SLA could go a long way towards driving uptake amongst major businesses.

The second side-effect of the general adoption of SLA’s by enterprise SMS providers would be an enhanced ability for purchasers and the world at large to benchmark the services on offer. If enterprise SMS SLA’s offered a standardised series of parameters in which a service would operate, a third party could quickly and easily compare the relevant capabilities of different services and could thus make an educated decision on which was the best. In the current, pre-SLA world, each provider makes a range of differing and often confusing claims about their own technology, making comparison and thus purchasing decisions complex. By making the SLA a standard part of enterprise SMS provision, the market would become clearer and thus the attraction for businesses more apparent.

Finally, the general introduction of SLA’s would result in a ‘clearing out’ of the enterprise SMS world. For too long, some providers have claimed to offer enterprise SMS whilst, in reality, only re-packaging consumer quality SMS as a business tool. Whilst consumer levels of service are acceptable for general purpose person-to-person communications, a significantly enhanced level of reliability and measurability is required when a mission critical task is at risk. By creating an open market in information about the different SMS services on offer, SLAs would force lower quality providers out of the market and would thus create a market offering real value to businesses.

TynTec’s SLAs
TynTec, as an enterprise quality mobile messaging operator, has been one of the first players in the market to offer enterprise SMS SLA’s. Working with companies like Skype, O2 and British Airways, often in truly mission critical areas, it has been necessary for the company to develop a service framework for its clients in order that they could adopt the service in their businesses.

The TynTec SLA has four key promises:

• Platform availability: TynTec gives the customer platform availability in percentages on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. This guarantees up to 99.999% platform availability on a six month basis.
• Message delivery time: The percentage of deliverable messages delivered in (15 sec) / 175 seconds (standard defined by ETSI).
• Platform throughput: A guarantee that TynTec’s SMSC is able to handle high volume traffic within certain criteria, e.g. the amount of SMS handled per second. Customers can contractually tailor guaranteed throughput to 5, 10, 20 or 50 SMS/second.
• Fault Fix Times: in case of outages, TynTec gives full support and communication to customers until the problem is solved, featuring a 24/7/365 technical support with guaranteed fault fix times.

On top of this, TynTec also provides a range of other SLA guarantees:

• Secure delivery: no storage of sensitive data in transit, no third party infrastructure is used to route the messages
• Traceability is provided through delivery receipts for each SMS, sourced directly from the user's handset
• Full GSM return codes with precise real-time sending status
• End-to-end control over the entire GSM delivery path
• Secure access via VPN, HTTPS or Secure SMPP

The future
It can be seen that SLA’s are a desirable outcome for the enterprise SMS community and that they are indeed possible. What is needed is a concerted effort by providers across the marketplace to make the promise offered by these contracts a reality.

Without SLA’s then SMS is always going to face problems breaking into the corporate IT department, but with them the technology will open up a huge new area of potential growth.