Business-as-a-Service in the Spotlight at Global Carrier Awards
The end of each year is reserved for recapping the events that marked the market, and giving out awards for the best achievements in telecoms, mobile and technology. This year we’ve been shortlisted in the Best SMS Innovation category at the Global Carrier Awards 2016 – a great honor for us at Infobip, and an important recognition of the work and expertise we’ve invested in building A2P SMS solutions and models for mobile network operators around the world.
In the tough and stellar competition of Airtel, Telarix, Telin and Turk Telekom, we’ve been nominated for our successful Business-as-a-Service partnership with Aircel India, which further confirms the importance and value of the innovative BaaS model in today’s dynamic mobile telecommunications ecosystem. We’d like to congratulate the winners Turk Telecom for their achievement.
Mobile operators worldwide are feeling the pressure of ensuring profitability and rolling out new mobile data services combined with falling revenues from long-standing profit drivers of voice and SMS. In such an environment, monetizing existing resources presents itself as excellent opportunity, especially in messaging with the global growth of A2P SMS messaging as a customer engagement and 2-factor authentication tool. However, many operators are not properly equipped to roll out an entirely new business, with all of its specifics and requirements without major investment and expenditure.
The A2P SMS business has significantly evolved over the years, with new business models and dedicated customer-facing tools developed by specialized messaging providers. Infobip’s Business-as-a-Service model aims to bring mobile operators not just an A2P SMS monetization solution, but an entire business through access to Infobip’s messaging platform, complete with specialized customer support, front end tools, integration and deployment, as well as a global sales force dedicated to onboarding new enterprise clients, who tend to generate the most traffic. Much more than a managed services deal, the BaaS models is a no capex, no opex partnership between Infobip and the mobile operator, powered by a decade of experience in A2P SMS messaging.
The Aircel partnership was rolled out initially in July 2015, as the first complete BaaS deployment and partnership. With Infobip setting up, integrating and managing the messaging platform, after an initial warmup period, daily traffic has already reached 200 million SMS messages. The partnership continues to a mutual benefit, as evidenced by the words of Reena Rathi, Business Head of VAS at Aircel.
With an ever-growing requirement of capacity and features for SMS, Aircel needed a partner that could balance a quick turnaround with a stable monitoring system. The partnership needed to deliver a platform that would enable real-time reporting, fair-traffic management and provide the support needed to keep our customers happy and Infobip’s BaaS service does just that. By adopting Infobip’s unique BaaS approach to running and development of our A2P SMS platform we have been able to maintain a high quality service that has been well received by our enterprise customers, without the investment that would normally be required to achieve this.
Reena Rathi – Business Head of VAS, Aircel
Attending the Global Carrier Awards 2016 Ceremony in Paris were Matija Razem, VP Business Development, Massimo Cristini, VP Business Operations, and Nikhil Shoorji, VP Sales India. The ceremony with dinner, charity auction, special guest speech and an after-party gathered 400 telecoms professionals from more than 50 companies from around the world.
