Companies that are on the enterprise level makes use of SMS messaging for both customer and employee communications. In fact, a study last year showed that 89% of enterprises use or plan to use SMS messaging starting this year.
That is great news! But often these companies will investigate the feasibility of building their own technical solutions rather than the outsource aspects of the business. So, an organization that decides to use SMS messaging as an essential part of their communications, may think about building their own SMS gateway. Read on to see three reasons why building an SMS gateway in-house is not the best route for most enterprises if your company is in this kind of category.
It’s Not Your FieldOf Operation
Your business, probably does not have anything to do with SMS messaging irrespective of what it is, (otherwise, you would have already been a provider of some sort, would you not ?). So, you have no in-house expertise in the subject area. Could you hire some experts in the field? Yes, of course, you could. But are you really interested in hiring experts in the field?
You see, there is a lot more to the SMS industry than the technical challenges of building a gateway. Beyond the technical requirements, there are negotiations and agreements with mobile operators and aggregators. There are also security and legal considerations when dealing with electronic communications.
So, inevitably you will need to hire people who know the industry from a variety of perspectives if you plan to build your own SMS solution.
Cost Prohibitive
Technically speaking, there is a lot of research and development done by developers of SMS gateways. There are costs for hardware, development, maintenance, and training. And there are per-message costs to send using Tier 1 routes because, at some point, any gateway needs to interface with an SMS aggregator or mobile operator. There are fees in that process that can not be avoided. Therefore, if you are having the feeling that these processes will be expensive to get an effective outcome, you are very correct.
Now consider the alternatives: You pay a few pence per message sent. No facilities, hardware, personnel, or maintenance beyond what you already have for your applications. Whereas, for the sake of saving money, some SMS service providers become unreliable, there causing endless problems.
The Integration Is Quite Simple
Chances are that, you already have applications you use for internal or customer communications – email, telephone, scheduling systems, online support programs, and it actually could be many applications. When you are planning to add SMS messaging to that mix, you may probably think that it is just a matter of adding the functionality to your existing programs.
And that is perhaps true because SMS service providers that have a good reputation offer application programming interface (API) that allows you connect to their service using your applications. This makes it a less complex thing to connect to, an existing gateway without worrying about the extra costs/charges or personnel/experts to develop or maintain it. You manage control over the applications, data, and costs.
It is simpler, safer and more economical than building your own system because building your own system limits the amount of functionality that the app developer has anyway. The functionality will be limited as your GSM-modem based SMS API is only able to perform certain functions – sending, receiving, the real basics of HTTP API development.
Hence, setting up your own SMS API and gateway, however, is only feasible if you have a tiny network of people to text, who will not mind the errors or security risks that this development can cause.
Conclusion
It is always best to go to experts to handle things. It will only yield to a more perfect result. Our vision, mission, values and strong team structure keeps us at the top notch and one of the bulk SMS gateway software provider an MNO or enterprise may wish for. TeleOSS helps in delivering the best in class solutions in the market. We design the solution that can be deployed in international telecom networks also. It needs complete knowledge of compliance of each country and telecom norms and regulations, which our solutions fully comply.
