Scotland-based Melrose Labs is launching a cloud-based mobile messaging platform on December 14, 2020, that will significantly lower barriers to entry in mobile messaging and encourage new entrants.

SMPP SMS Gateway enables mobile messaging providers and enterprises to operate their own mobile messaging gateways and provide a host of new services to their customers, including services in the fast-growing application-to-person (A2P) SMS segment, which has been valued at $17bn globally and is expected to reach $26bn in 2022*.

By providing best-in-class gateway capabilities at a lower cost, Melrose Labs hopes to empower new entrants and spur innovation in a marketplace currently dominated by a few large players.

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Existing mobile messaging providers are also keen to access the growing market for rich and conversational messaging. But they are often held back by outdated and expensive infrastructure that is complicated to operate. This is what the SMPP SMS Gateway was designed to address.

The SMPP SMS Gateway is the brainchild of telecoms and mobile messaging industry veteran, Mark Hay. Before founding Melrose Labs, Mark Hay already had a successful track record as an entrepreneur, as well as a strong background in software engineering. He founded, grew, and eventually sold his profitable company HSL Mobile, exiting in 2018. This experience honed his expertise in both the technical and commercial realities of mobile messaging.

“I believe the opportunity for mobile messaging providers is huge because SMS has unequivocally shown us that it can cut through the noise. The open rate for SMS messages is 4.5 times greater than email, and they usually get read in under 2 minutes. That’s why A2P SMS, and OTT messaging with the likes of WhatsApp, has become such a huge growth area.”

“We believe that with access to the right technology, many innovative organizations can break into the under-served A2P SMS and OTT mobile messaging market, or address it more effectively, and compete with the big players.”

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“Dependability is a big issue for mobile messaging providers. End-users rely on messaging providers to deliver important notifications such as emergency communications, one-time passwords, marketing messages, and parcel delivery updates. They often need the capacity to send tens or hundreds of thousands of messages in a short space of time. So the system we built to support those services was made to be extremely robust, reliable, simple to maintain, and scalable to demand. Our level of trust in SMPP SMS Gateway as a platform is such that we will be using it to operate our upcoming Tyr SMS Gateway service that’ll provide global message delivery to over 1000 networks.”

With SMPP SMS Gateway, mobile messaging providers and enterprises get a solid, globally distributed network that can be trusted to reliably provide services to customers and handle billing, pricing management, reporting, and monitoring. This one-stop-shop cloud platform also enables management of supplier messaging connections.

In addition, users of SMPP SMS Gateway will be able to access other Melrose Labs services that include bulk SMS, Rich Messaging, RCS, OTT messaging, and two-way text messaging using shortcodes, virtual mobile numbers, and SIM hosting.

CPaaS is the sophisticated and cost-effective back-end communications infrastructure that can be used to enable personalized communications across voice, messaging, and video. It integrates seamlessly with customers’ applications and systems through the use of APIs.

SMPP SMS Gateway empowers businesses both large and small to exploit the opportunities in messaging at a competitive price. “When you’re living in a gold rush, you need picks and shovels,” says Mark Hay. “We’re selling the picks and shovels for CPaaS mobile messaging.”