Telcos under pressure to "reimagine communications"

A wave of consolidation will wash over the social messaging industry this year, leading to the emergence of formidable industry players and heaping more pressure on traditional mobile operator messaging revenues, Ovum predicts.

The recent high-profile acquisitions of WhatsApp by Facebook for around US$19 billion and of Viber by Japanese online retailer Rakuten for US$900 million show that social messaging is becoming a core part of all over-the-top (OTT) services, the research firm said.

More consolidation is expected to follow, meaning some social messaging services will become even more formidable threats to mobile operators’ traditional business models.

The next five years will thus be crucial for the mobile sector, Ovum said, with operators under pressure to adjust their messaging solutions and even their overall communications suites.

“Operators should work closely with OTT players and device vendors to create services that go beyond traditional communications, leverage operator strengths, are device agnostic and can be sold to their consumers as subscription packages,” Ovum consumer telecoms analyst Neha Dharia said.

“Social messaging is a snapshot of things to come, and the traditional scope of messaging is already being tested - payments, media sharing and location are all being added to messaging platforms.”

The telecom sector has already introduced a series of initiatives around pricing, Rich Communication Services (RCS) and operator-led messaging apps to respond to the challenge, Ovum said.

Messaging platforms are meanwhile expected to expand beyond messaging into complete mobile media platforms, including voice and video calls and utility services.

Within the next 10 years, Ovum foresees messaging and communications services evolving to the extent that services are able to choose and seamlessly switch between the communications channel - such as voice, video and text messaging - that best suits a particular conversation.

“In the long run, operators will have to reimagine communications, moving it from the core function to a platform supporting a range of other services. It will, in essence, be a device-agnostic platform that the user’s digital world will plug into,” Dharia said.

Image courtesy of Álvaro Ibáñez under CC