A2P Business Messages to Reach 3.5 Trillion by 2023, As RCS & OTT Technologies Gain Traction

A whopping 3.5 trillion business Application-to-Person (A2P) and messages will be delivered by 2023, up from an estimated 2.5 trillion in 2019, a 40 percent rate a.new study from Juniper Research has found that that the rich media interactivity of Rich Communications Suite (RCS) would make the emerging messaging technology popular for retail and marketing business use cases.

The report forecasts that this enhanced functionality will drive RCS traffic to an average annual growth of 290 percent over the next four years, to help the growth of operators’ total messaging revenues.

56 Billion RCS Business Messages to be Delivered by 2023
However, despite strong growth, RCS will account for only 2 percent of all A2P traffic by 2023, reaching 56 billion A2P messages. The research suggested that A2P messaging users will continue to use SMS owing to the familiarity of the protocol.

As a result, the growth of RCS will be mostly driven by new traffic, rather than the migration of existing traffic from SMS.

“The growth of RCS traffic will be driven by users migrating away from dedicated mobile apps, research author Sam Barker remarked. “Future technology will develop to become the first point of contact for RCS users to engage with brands over mobile devices within 5 years”.

OTT Business Messages to Grow 700 Percent over the Next 4 Years
The research also found that OTT business messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp for Business, will deliver 236 billion messages by 2023. However, they will continue to suffer from a fragmented user base across multiple messaging applications.

In response, the research cited the use of Communications-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) solutions as essential to enable fallback onto the ubiquitous SMS protocol to ensure message termination. Additionally, it found these platforms will allow the collection of insightful data, including contact preferences, to enable A2P business users to optimize messaging campaigns.

(For more information visit http://www.juniperresearch.com).