Will Your Customers Take SMS into Their Own Hands?

The extended question then is this, “What is a carrier going to do when small business owners start to use this type of package to send and receive 5,000 or 10,000 messages a month using a hardware gateway?” Will carriers look at their true cost of carrying SMS messages (which I have to believe is almost infinitesimally small?) and let it go? Or will they try to force these customers onto a metered, per-message rate plan? How the carriers react to this type of equipment – how they structure rate plans around it – is going to be critical to the longer term success of the category.

However, despite potential issues with the outbound SMS business case, far more interesting to me is using the SMSFinder as an alternative to short code services. Everyone loves short codes and that’s a problem – like area codes and exchanges, there are only a limited number of short codes available, and finding a vanity code that “fits” your corporate or product name (like 46645 for Google) is becoming harder and harder to do. And short codes aren’t cheap – the $1000-$1500 per month (not including usage) may be a drop in the bucket Google, but it’s a heck of a lot for most SMBs.

What SMSFinder could offer these businesses is an alternative that uses a vanity number, which are more widely available and considerably less expensive than vanity short codes. A local pizza parlor may well be able to get XXX-XXP-IZZA as a phone number, they’re not ever going to get PIZZA as a short code. And that phone number is not going to cost them $1000/month – even without a cheap unlimited messaging plan.

One down-side is that the Multi-Tech is slow – it handles only about 10 messages a minute outbound. Multi-Tech expects to launch multi-channel and multi-port boxes to choose from, says Multi-Tech.

What will be interesting is to see who else starts to take advantage of this. SMS transport players could issue SIM card access into their accounts to complement API access. MVNOs could rebrand these boxes as onramps to their messaging world too.

The carriers appear to be lagging in meeting SMB messaging needs, as usual. Carriers need to start opening up their networks to more generic API access as SMS gateway operators. Lacking simple API access into messaging networks – simple Developer Zones where users can log in, get a developer key, and start sending away – application developers are going to look elsewhere for satisfaction. In the battle between network-based Clickatell-like services and hardware-based Multi-Tech-style boxes, there’s probably room for both to excel. In this case, Multi-Tech is going to sell a lot of these boxes. The question is simply this: what are carriers going to do about it?