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1. Mobility Trends in the Enterprise
1.1. Overall Idea and Benefits
Most enterprises currently view mobile technology as a relatively minor portion of their overall IT budgets. However, mobile empowerment enables employees to leverage efficiency while they are on the move. Mobile enabling technologies, especially those related to messaging, can be applied in several business processes and mission-critical operations, such as field force operations in product delivery, logistics and field sales. Task-specific devices and applications are extending business-critical systems such as ERP and CRM to automate previously manual field operations (e.g. order entry, trouble ticketing, dispatching) through deployment of data-enabled mobile devices. Messaging applications provide also good results in enhancing internal corporate communications across a variety of departments within the company and with external parties, such as suppliers and consultants.
The enterprise mobility market is finally beginning to take true advantage of the opportunities that messaging technologies hold. Market research carried out by the Mobile Data Association has revealed that the UK's SME community is widely embracing mobile messaging technology, from text messaging through to mobile e-mail solutions. Larger enterprises are also increasingly using mobile messaging technologies to improve efficiency and enhance corporate communications. Integrating messaging solutions into back-end systems of enterprises is becoming increasingly popular, and the use of corporate mobile devices as a channel for efficient communication is becoming easier to manage because of Mobile Device Management. Mobility, therefore, must be included in enterprise IT strategy.
1.2. Mobile Messaging Technologies Deployed in Enterprises
Short Message Service (SMS)
SMS is now, and will remain, the most popular data transmission technology. In 20 of the largest European countries, more than 20 billion SMS are exchanged every month. SMS messages are a cheaper alternative to voice communication and its user-friendly and interactive format ensures immediate communication. SMS also has a universal reach which guarantees compatibility with all mobile handsets, as well as being absolutely confidential and discrete.
Due to its ubiquity and the fact that almost everyone knows how to send a message, SMS provides enterprises with a mobile solution that can create real impact in corporate processes and communications. Besides being easy and simple to use, SMS has a low total cost of ownership in terms of training and maintenance. Because of these features, SMS can be deployed in all levels of the company, improving the internal flow of communication among staff. This makes SMS even more attractive for businesses who wish to optimize processes and improve communications at a low cost.
Although SMS messaging is a simple, cheap and efficient communication channel, many enterprises are still reluctant to deploy it as a corporate tool. The issue many enterprises have is the lack of reliability and security while transmitting business information.
Application-to-Person (A2P) and Person-to-Application (P2A) messaging, or simply enterprise messaging, have been hampered by the limitations of the mobile infrastructure, which has been built for Person-to-Person (P2P) SMS. P2P messaging, or “consumer” SMS, is provided by different levels of operators or SMS resellers and can often be delayed or even lost en route to the customer – an unacceptable level of unreliability in a critical area such as the enterprise scenario.
The enterprise SMS market has to evolve from the P2P infrastructure into a model that supplies businesses with a reliable, secure and scalable messaging. Independent SMS operators are already providing enterprise SMS infrastructure to support demanding SLAs (Service level Agreements), including guaranteeing delivery of messages. Scaling SMS to enterprise application is the challenge SMS providers/aggregators and mobile operators should be including in their mobility research and development agenda in the next years.
Mobile e-mail
Mobile e-mail is a value-added service, an attractive and fashionable market dominated by a number of major companies such as RIM, Seven, Ericsson, Oracle and even Microsoft. The size of the market is still small though, with a penetration rate of less than 1% in terms of world’s total mobile user base.
Although mobile e-mail is supported by the latest developments in mobile communications market, the technology is only common among highly paid professionals. The total costs of ownership attached to the service (devices, software, authentication, configuration, back-up, support) stops corporations deploying it across multiple levels of the organization, hindering a broad range of take-up. The result is that mobile e-mail is not able to create a measurable impact in corporate processes and communications. This is hampering the mobile extension of fixed-line e-mail, stopping benefits spreading through different levels of corporations.
Whilst the price issue is the main barrier to widespread adoption of mobile e-mail by enterprises, market penetration will gradually increase as more competitors enter the market, and prices will eventually fall. The growth in mobile e-mail will not cannibalize SMS revenues, as some in the messaging sector predict; rather both technologies will co-exist and stimulate the growth of each other. For example SMS is already the preferred channel with mobile e-mail devices to let the user know that there is a new e-mail in the inbox.
Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM)
Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) allows users to communicate with other wireline and mobile users through a similar service to wireline IM services provided by Internet chat providers such as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo!. According to Portio Research’s “Mobile Messaging Futures 2005 – 2010”, 3G adoption and consumer acceptance of MIM promises to boost the service over the next few years.
Considered as the next-generation of SMS, IM is still a long way down the messaging road, especially regarding enterprise messaging. Issues such as interoperability and bandwidth still have to be solved for MIM to take off. One of the key benefits promoted for mobile IM is presence, what allows users to see whether their buddies are “online”. Given that most phones are turned on nearly all the time this seems rather redundant. The real advantage MIM has over SMS is the ability to chat on mobile networks.
With regards to enterprise deployment, it seems probable that MIM is more suitable for Person-to-Person (P2P) traffic, when an informal interaction is more likely to happen. However, services that interact directly with consumers such as customer care departments and call centres might be potential enterprise applications for MIM.
In the case of messaging services in the Application-to-Person (A2P) scenario such as mobile banking, or in 1-way messaging applications, such as health care systems, SMS is still the best communication alternative to keep in touch with mobile workforces and customers.
Mobile Device Management
The increasing complexity and diversity of mobile handsets demands more intensive management to ensure accurate service settings across company device fleets. As more and more mobile devices, PDAs and smart phones are rolled out in an enterprise environment, Mobile Device Management (MDM) is crucial to providing support, configuration and set-up as well as providing remote software updates and security management.
MDM relies on ‘over the air’ SMS to perform updates, configurations and security settings, meaning that SMS is still the preferred delivery mechanism to support MDM processes. Over the air SMS means increased control, safety and efficiency for smart devices, as well as being far more cost effective than the previous method of physically servicing each individual appliance. MDM over the air also means increased security as devices can have patches issued remotely, as well as allowing ‘locking SMS’ to be sent to incapacitate lost or stolen devices, rendering them useless. MDM is also able to remotely upgrade mission-critical applications on mobile devices, instantly improving outdated software and increasing productivity.
The increase in service sophistication is often accompanied by an increase in inbound customer care traffic due to users’ contacting their service providers to remedy a connection error. Mobile Device Management (MDM) simplifies the manual and automated procedures for the remote provisioning of devices (for example, MMS, WAP and GPRS settings), configurations and security procedures, what reduces the need of customer care and additional service support.
2. SMS as a Corporate Communications Channel
2.1. Types of SMS
Person-to-Person (P2P) messaging: examples are countless – notes to family about being caught in traffic, to friends about a party, etc.
Premium-based services: short news, sports, traffic, weather, and more upon consumer’s request. Premium SMS is a billing mechanism that charges a “premium rate” for such value-added data.
Mobile commerce: users can buy services and goods, e.g. movie tickets, or pay for a car parking via SMS.
Application-to-Person (A2P) or Person-to-Application (P2A) messaging: A2P / P2A can be a one-way message that is time-sensitive and/or mission-critical, e.g. banks sending real-time transaction notification, logistics managers sending tasks and/or urgent requests to operational workforce. Notification services in the corporate environment are also suitable, such as cancellation of a meeting and a customer urgent call.
2.2. Worldwide Growth of SMS
SMS owes its success to its simplicity – it is quick, easy, discreet and inexpensive. According to Portio Research’s “Mobile Messaging Futures 2005 – 2010”, the global volume of SMS traffic is expected to increase from 760 billion messages in 2004 to over 2,379 billion messages by 2010. The corresponding revenue for SMS will grow from around USD 30 billion in 2004 to over USD 50 billion by 2010.
Enterprise (A2P and P2A) SMS volumes are set to more than double between 2005 and 2010. Supported by the growth in TV voting, mobile marketing, location-based services, mobile banking, business-critical applications and corporate communications, the volume of enterprise SMS is expected to increase from 84 billion in 2004 to 186 billion or more in 2010.
Worldwide SMS Traffic Volumes per Region (In Billions, 2004 – 2010)
Person-to-Person and Application-to-Person*
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Region
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2004
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2005
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2006
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2007
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2008
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2009
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2010
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Europe
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204.8
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232.3
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292.9
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384.2
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521.9
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605.5
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639.6
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Asia Pacific
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434.1
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540.1
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672.8
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802.4
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935.9
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1,072.1
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1,212.7
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North America
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52.6
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77.3
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114.6
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150.2
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193.7
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227.8
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249.3
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Latin America
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44.7
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72.3
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89.6
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115.8
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136.2
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156.7
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174.8
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Rest of the world
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24.4
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29.2
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38.9
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52.5
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72.2
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86.6
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102.8
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Global
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760.6
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951.2
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1,208.8
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1,505.2
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1,859.8
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2,148.6
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2,379.3
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Source: Portio Research “Mobile Messaging Futures 2005 – 2010”, June 2005
Europe
SMS is the dominant messaging application in emerging 3G markets, with all countries witnessing significant growth in volumes between 1999 and 2003. Currently revenue from SMS forms the vast majority of all non-voice revenues in these markets, in order of 90% or more.
The European market has long been considered one of the most advanced in terms of SMS adoption and usage. Because Europe is a mature market segment for consumer SMS services and people feel comfortable using them, premium or high-value services such as gaming, information alerts and advertising find easier acceptance.
SMS will remain the main messaging medium for corporate usage in Europe, although mobile e-mail is increasing in importance and penetration, albeit somewhat slowly because of the cost.
Asia Pacific
Voice revenues mainly drive markets such as China, India and Philippines, but SMS also represents the bulk of non-voice revenue for operators and is growing fast. SMS accounts for more than 80 percent of data revenue in 2G-2.5G markets. The Asia Pacific SMS market is projected to be the fastest-growing text messaging market in the world by 2010 in pure volume terms, according to the estimation of Portio Research.
SMS usage in advanced 3G markets such as Japan and South Korea also promises to increase. This is due to enterprise messaging services already implemented in markets such as mobile banking, stock trading, mobile payments and ticket reservations.
North America
Clearly the United States and Canada are large potential market segments for SMS services; mobile penetration continues to rise and SMS applications such as TV voting are also increasing (e.g. American Idol).
Mobile Instant Messaging for Person-to-Person purposes is expected to drive growth in the American market. However, SMS volumes are growing at a larger pace than mature markets such as Europe and SMS promises to take off in A2P scenarios, e.g. TV voting, mobile marketing, mobile banking and m-commerce.
2.3. SMS Applications in the Corporate Environment
The SMS infrastructure used today was designed for consumer messaging purposes. Low capacity and delays are common occurrences that mobile operators and other messaging providers face when providing SMS services to enterprises.
The nature of enterprises’ information process requires reliability, security and traceability. Standard consumer SMS does not provide these features and for a long time this hindered the growth of SMS within the corporate market.
Through latest developments in SS7 signaling technology, SMS equipment and business models, enterprise-grade SMS has been gradually improving over the past couple of years and as such SMS is now being used in many corporate processes, for example operations, communications and logistics. New deployments are announced every day and examples abound particularly in the airlines, health care, IT, logistics and banking industries.
In the airline industry for instance SMS is being used in the operational field to alert crews about flight delays, incidents and to update scheduling data. SMS is here particularly useful in registering departure and arrival of crews, being an innovative input to calculate statutory rest requirements. Internal communication to identify the crew for a flight, for example, can also be done via SMS.
Health care services need a cost-effective and universal communication channel to alert patients about appointments as well as to monitor medication and treatment. This process is highly improved through SMS, as it is cheaper than telephone calls and can be sent to several people at the same time, saving time and money in communication with patients. Text messaging is also used as an internal communication with health staff for emergency situations.
Renaissance is the word for mobile banking. Early adopters relied on messaging to deliver personal financial information for account holders, but due to lack of reliability, security and customers’ confidentiality the mobile banking proposition did not move on. The current infrastructure offered by SMS providers, especially the independent SMS operators (see section 2.4. Enterprise-grade SMS Deployment), allows a better reliability and security (with VPN connection, for example), as well as protecting personal data.
Financial institutions are now able to distribute account information such as balance statements, overdraft alerts and transaction notifications. SMS technology is advancing and is now able to provide authentication information for services such as online banking, being a second layer of security in mobile transactions. The advent of reliable and secure services, assuring customers’ confidentiality and high speed in the delivery of messages, is creating new possibilities for banks who want open up a range of new consumer interface opportunities as well as potential new revenue sources.
SMS is also being used to scrutinize mission-critical elements of some core business processes. From the monitoring of temperature critical environments to alerting people on system crashes, SMS enhances crisis management and provides immediate response to urgent situations.
SMS also has many applications in daily life; from sending school results to students, to airline check-in and making bank payments, there are many opportunities for SMS. However, it is critical that the messaging infrastructure behind the service is reliable, secure and scalable enough to cope with the enterprise requirements.
2.1. Enterprise-grade SMS Deployment
To develop a scalable, reliable and secure messaging infrastructure enterprises require capability to route SMS from end-to-end, having full visibility and control of the messages.
SS7 access is a key asset to performing SMS routing from end-to-end. SS7 is the principal signaling technology for SMS messages and is likely to remain in this position, and the players having direct access to it have a high differentiation in quality. In fact, almost all of the past decade’s value-added services, including mobility, voice mail and SMS, exist because of SS7 signaling.
SS7 access is mandatory to provide reliability, security and scalability for mobile business applications as it is necessary to route corporate data in a secure way and to ensure its delivery.
An SS7-based connectivity approach centers on strategic partnerships with mobile network operators, taking advantage of their SS7 signaling. This solution allows SS7-SMS service providers the ability to route data through their own infrastructure, allowing SMS sending directly to and from recipients without having to go through the SMS-Centres of other operators. Delays and message losses are avoided due to the total control and visibility of message path and SS7-SMS service providers can offer full delivery guarantees of messages and optimized routing through partnerships with key hub operators.
3. Future Outlook in the Enterprise Messaging Market
Enterprises are adopting messaging technologies in order to increase efficiency, improve business processes and enhance customer satisfaction. Main messaging trends are leading businesses into several applications using SMS, such as scheduling and staff coordination, mobile workforce empowerment and customer relationship management.
Many messaging technologies are coming up every day, promising to mobilize enterprises through improving the productivity and communication of employees on the move, as well as creating new channels to reach the consumers’ minds and pockets. However, many sophisticated messaging technologies will provide enterprises with benefits and cost savings in the long run; either because they are too expensive to be deployed today (e.g. mobile e-mail), or because they are not ubiquitous yet (e.g. Mobile Instant Messaging - MIM).
The mobile e-mail story, for example, started 3 years ago with powerful devices able to push e-mails immediately; however companies are still unable to deploy Blackberries and Treos to great part of their staff due to a high total cost of ownership, training, maintenance and mobile device management.
At the same time, MIM still needs a lot of compatible devices and interoperability to work on every network, as well as more strategic partnerships between mobile operators and ISPs such as Yahoo! and Google in order to take off the service successfully. The best conclusion would come up with SMS as being still the simple, easy and ubiquitous messaging tool that works anywhere, anytime and reaches a broad range of networks. SMS is so useful that it is even supporting Mobile Device Management for configurations and updates of smart phones and PDAs through over the air messaging.
It is true that MIM and mobile e-mail allow more interactivity and presence to mobile communications. However, SMS follows a different technology path and business model that makes it simple, cheap and ubiquitous. The fact is that SMS is here today and people understand it. SMS provides a powerful communication channel for enterprises, but the messages have to be carried carefully and transported in a secure and reliable way.
And is in this aspect the challenge begins: the potential of SMS as an enterprise communication tool is tremendous, but the infrastructure that transports business data must be reliable and secure. The enterprise-grade messaging infrastructure, which goes far beyond P2P SMS, has the potential to create new revenue streams in the messaging arena.
The latest mobile industry forecast is that SMS will be cannibalized by MIM in the P2P environment, and mobile e-mail in the A2P/P2A fields. The latest reports and estimations of volumes for SMS for both P2P and A2P/P2A say the contrary though. SMS will keep a healthy pace despite the growth of different messaging technologies, meaning that mobile e-mail and MIM will not cannibalize SMS. As messaging triggers more messaging, it is more probable that messaging technologies such as SMS, MIM and mobile e-mail will co-exist and stimulate the growth of each other in different aspects of consumer and business life.
4.TynTec’s Enterprise Mobility Solutions
Delivering SMS messaging services in a worldwide scale, TynTec’s SMS services provides enterprises, MNOs, MVNOs, SMS resellers and aggregators with 100% delivery SMS guarantees in less than 15 seconds, being especially suitable for mission-critical applications.
5. Case Studies
5.1. Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, collaborating with its clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments.
One of the most difficult administrative tasks is to rapidly contact staff during meetings or travel to provide time sensitive information. Accenture realized that with communication based on SMS, the possibility of reaching its employees at anytime and anywhere gave them a competitive advantage over other consultancies.
With TynTec’s eBizSMS™ Suite to facilitate internal communications between administrative staff and consultants dispersed geographically, Accenture has found an accurate and cost effective way to significantly improve its corporate communications. By using SMS to communicate, Accenture can guarantee rapid, timely communication to and from its workforce.
TynTec’s eBizSMS™ allows Accenture to coordinate its employees in an efficient, cost effective manner and accelerate project management decisions, leading to improved management and overall internal communications quality.
Deploying eBizSMS™ also provides Accenture with a potential reduction of telecommunication costs for short calls by up to 40%. SMS is low cost, and when it substitutes the traditional communication systems (fixed-line telephone, mobile, e-mail) the savings in telecommunications can be achieved quickly.
“By guaranteeing the timely delivery of messages and by giving us clear information such as delivery receipts, we can use SMS in business critical environments. SMS has some clear advantages over mobile email, not least in its global coverage and low total cost of ownership. We see TynTec’s eBizSMSas a tool to improve our internal communication,” says Christine Schneider of Accenture.
5.2 British Airways Connect
BA Connect is a fully owned subsidiary of British Airways and is one of the most cost-efficient carriers across the entire group.
The company needed a reliable communication system that would help mission critical business operations run as efficiently as possible, working as a ubiquitous alert system that would work across Europe to inform their staff with vital information.
British Airways Connect chose eBizSMS from enterprise quality SMS provider TynTec to deliver this mission-critical information. Unlike traditional ‘consumer’ SMS TynTec allows enterprises to guarantee the delivery of SMS, therefore meeting the high Service Level Agreements required by BA Connect, which operates in an international scale.
BA Connect uses SMS in several applications. In the event of incidents it is essential that messages are guaranteed to be delivered to a complex chain of recipients. This means messages need to be sent to staff to order the correct parts, make sure engineers are sent to fix the broken plane, inform insurance companies and that a replacement aircraft is scheduled, all as quickly as possible. All this needs to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Keeping aircrew informed of changes in their roster and other important scheduling information is also made via SMS. BizSMS is allowing the company to schedule and re-schedule mission-critical tasks using SMS, offering greater flexibility and efficiency.
TynTec meets very stringent SLAs by guaranteeing that all messages are delivered. Because of this BA Connect can be assured that complex scheduling information is delivered to all staff using an approach they can understand, leveraging efficiency and cost effectiveness in BA Connect’s operational processes.
Abdhul Choudhury, IT operations manager for British Airways (BA) Connect said, “SMS is the most business beneficial system we have ever rolled out, it is a killer application. We are now using it for an increasing number of mission critical tasks as it allows us to be very flexible and reactive, which is the nature of the airline industry. TynTec allows us the confidence that 100% of all messages sent have been delivered in a timely fashion, in every country that we operate in.”
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