OpenMarket – June 9, 2015
I was reading our recently released IDC Industry InfoBriefs and was pleasantly surprised to see that the enterprise messaging respondents reconfirmed the importance of Professional and Managed Services to their businesses. OpenMarket leads the way in this area with a dedicated team of consultants that scope, design and deliver mobile messaging and engagement projects on top of OpenMarket’s Mobile Engagement Platform and infrastructure.
The numbers speak for themselves. In 9 out of the 10 vertical markets surveyed by IDC, enterprises reported that their biggest issue with their current mobile messaging vendor was that they did not offer Professional or Managed Services. In case you were wondering about the other sector, it’s organizations in Education that reported Professional and Managed Services as their second most important issue, closely following ‘poor customer support.’ At OpenMarket, delivering superior support services is an area of critical importance and one in which we excel.
Source: IDC InfoBrief, “Exploring the Impact of Mobile Messaging on Customers, Employees and Operations” March 2015.
Our Consulting and Professional Services team views this data as further validation of a trend we’ve seen developing for a number of years. Over that time, our team has helped many of our enterprise clients with some element of creating and managing their service on top of OpenMarket’s APIs and self-service tools. In the past, many customers would have their own in-house development team or a 3rd party build a mobile platform that integrates with our messaging APIs, but now they are much more likely to use our platform to self-service most of their needs and have our Professional Services team provide custom configuration and integration when needed.
There is always great variation in these projects. It can be something as simple as building a workflow in the Mobile Engagement Platform Service Manager, to providing onsite support for a high profile TV telethon, or building a custom application with message processing, user preference storing, and client and end-user facing interfaces on top of the platform. We relish the variety of work we see in helping enterprise customers get the most from our technology.
What do we hear from our customers about the value of a Professional Services capability in a mobile messaging vendor?
- Enterprises with constrained development teams and extended product roadmaps can tactically engage with a Professional Services team to accelerate their mobile projects while staying focused on their core business.
- Customers value the mobile expertise our Professional Services team can bring to their project. We are able to help them design compelling customer engagements while avoiding common pitfalls and regulatory issues that are unique to mobile messaging.
- Working directly with OpenMarket and our in-house Professional Services team means that customers get access to a team that is closely aligned with the development, operations and support teams. They are able to get the very most out of our Mobile Engagement Platform and SMS API.
I expect the need for Professional or Managed Services to continue and that more and more global enterprises will be looking for a platform with these capabilities to meet their needs. Please contact us to learn how you can leverage our mobile messaging solutions today.