Rob Lawson, COO of IDT Messaging spoke at this year's Capacity North America on the challenges within the messaging market and what needs to be addressed to ensure that mobile operators stay ahead of OTT applications

NEWARK, NJ - September, 22nd 2014:  Rob Lawson, COO of IDT Messaging highlighted some key gaps the industry is facing at this year's Capacity North America.  IDT Corporation (NYSE: IDT), is a leading supplier of wholesale voice and payment services to telecommunications providers around the world,  as well as an innovative white label OTT messaging service that combines IP and SMS messaging.
In recent years carriers have had to adapt to the changing market to survive, with global bandwidth consumption increasingly being driven by the content and application ecosystem, and emerging technologies disrupting and revolutionizing carrier business models and networks. In his presentation Rob Lawson, COO of IDT messaging discussed the challenges that are provoking the need for continued market evolution by mobile operators, and ways that traditional messaging can now be monetized and open new revenue streams to stay ahead of the growing number of OTT applications.
Lawson, discussed the dramatic user transition from traditional SMS text messages to a multitude of OTT messaging brands and technologies such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and KakaoTalk and the geographical differences for each brand. Using the latest industry research he demonstrated how mobile operators need to act now if they are to stay ahead of the OTT curve and adapt their traditional SMS offering to provide a more robust experience and create an additional revenue stream from their messaging service.
"Mobile operators continue to lose customers and revenues to OTT messaging services.  According to research carried out by Deloitte we are seeing in excess of an estimated 50 billion messages being sent daily on OTT chat apps - more than double the estimated 20 billion SMS messages." said Rob Lawson, COO of IDT Messaging. "By using a white label service such as IDT messaging mobile operators can get back in the game by providing a more robust experience that integrates IP messaging and SMS, thus outperforming both OTT and SMS competitors."
IDT Messaging has a unique offering to the messaging market and includes ‘MagicWords' a technology which dynamically analyzes the context of a conversation and adds links to particular words to supplement and enhance the conversation. ‘MagicWords' brings content discovery and distribution back into the operator domain while creating mobile advertising and monetization opportunities. Additional features of IDT Messaging include IP messaging as well as accessibility to Cloud storage of contacts, messages and media. The messaging service also hosts group conversations, video and photo sharing, location sharing as well as SMS integration & connectivity.