I got a bit of news in from the SMS industry this morning. Silverstreet, the mobile messaging firm, has just announced they’ve terminated (or ‘delivered’) a whopping 400 million SMS messages in the month of December 2010 alone. This sounds like good news to me.
The chaps over at Silverstreet are understandably delighted and dropped me a note to let me know. It is, as Chief Commerical Officer Simon Landsheer puts it, ‘a big milestone for us’.
I asked Simon to put this in some context for me.
‘Well, this time last year, we did 160 million terminations,’ he explained by email. Nice. That’s some increase!
It’s very difficult to measure Silverstreet’s exact position in the marketplace — but an array of estimates I’ve got from various people I’ve spoken to places them amongst the top ‘Tier 1’ players in the bulk SMS market.
The chances are you probably haven’t come across Silverstreet unless you’re heavily involved in the SMS messaging segment of the industry. I’ve met one or two executives from the company in the past, principally because they’re a paid up full member of the Mobile Entertainment Forum (and board member of the MEF Asia chapter).
The company was founded in 1998 in the Netherlands and grew to become a big player in that market, specifically focusing on SMS services in the entertainment industry. But it wasn’t long before they got stuck into the rest of the marketplace such as retail, education and transportation.
They’ve since expanded out of their home country, with operations extending around the planet — including the United Kingdom, Kuala Lumpur, Australia, Singapore, Philippines and Israel.
Silverstreet’s traffic achievements are an excellent indication that far from being on the wane, SMS is still very much a critical component of the marketing mix. Indeed, I’d much rather get an SMS to ask me when I’d like a deliver to be made, rather than a Twitter message or IM message that I’m potentially unlikely to get in a timely manner. The brilliance with the SMS medium is that provided you’re in the vicinity of your handset, you’re going to get a notification and you won’t miss the message. In some cases, the push notifications on platforms such as Apple do a reasonable job, but there’s next to no way you can rely on that medium unless you’re 100% sure everyone you need to talk to is using it. And if you’re a big brand, trying to talk to me via mobile, you do it by SMS. I actually can’t see this changing in the short term.
Anyway, congratulations to the team at Silverstreet — it’s obviously been a very good year! Keep it up!