Brent Newsome's blog

This blog was inspired by a lively discussion I had last week, for those not there, I thought putting pen to paper would help capture it.

Don't "Market" joyn. No flashy websites, commercials, celebrity spokespeople, or race-car endorsements. Simply no media blitz of any kind. You don't need it and you're wasting shareholders money.

While this may seem to be unconventional and controversial advice to a large telcom with a huge marketing budget, but  this advice is based on practical lessons learned. 

Competitors in the mobile messaging space all started as (and many continue to be) small companies -- WhatsApp, Pinger, Kik, Viber, Skype, Facebook.

One day RCSe may become the default messaging client offered by handset vendors and MNOs. However, it has the potential to be much more. Since the RCSe client exists as an application in smartphones and other devices, it becomes a key element of the customer user experience.

This means it can be branded and optimised for the network provider offering the service. It also means that it can be customised to meet the needs of other providers, including MVNOs.

An operator offering RCSe can enable MVNOs on its network to also offer RCSe services and capabilities via white label solutions that permit further customisation and branding to deliver a personalised experience.

Yesterday, we had a conversation with a European carrier, who explained to us that the obstacle for them implementing RCS, was the upfront capital cost to purchase an RCS Instant Messaging Application Server and an XDMS.

For some time, it’s been thought that deployment of RCS-e has a number of barriers – IMS being the main one.  Clearly up-front cost is another barrier. Anticipating these barriers, we have come up with a solution that provides an operator with an RCS-e deployment that can be offered by leveraging a hosted offer.

Over the last few years we have seen a number of bullish forecasts for RCS success. Recently, this has changed somewhat, as a new report from Infonetics reveals.

Today we were talking to a very large professional services firm who works with mobile operators about our RCS-e product.  Like always within a few minutes, the inevitable question was asked about the business case for RCS on the part of the mobile operators. Every service launch has to be carefully considered and the potential revenue balanced against the potential costs. Of course, this is logical and the kind of thought process we go through in our own business.