MEF Member Juniper Research has launched a new resource for the Mobile Messaging industry – Tech Horizon for Mobile Messaging 2025 is a free resource that delivers an independent assessment of how a particular group of technologies is evolving. VP of Telecoms Market Research for Juniper Sam Barker shares the key technologies identified by their analysis of the mobile messaging market.
Juniper Research is proud to introduce its Tech Horizon for the mobile messaging market; a visual representation of where our expert analysts rank technologies in the space. The Tech Horizon is an invaluable resource for mobile messaging platform providers, operators and communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) service providers; offering an independent assessment of various mobile messaging technologies and identifying up-and-coming and potentially disruptive technologies.
This assessment is based on Juniper Research’s extensive analysis of the mobile messaging market; covering a wide array of messaging technologies and services that can disrupt messaging services through our range of research studies and forecasts.
The Tech Horizon also considers each technology’s maturity. As these technologies mature, they move along the line until they either establish themselves as foundational to the mobile messaging market, or are replaced by other more efficient technologies. The Tech Horizon provides a single window into the technologies in the market; providing clarity as to how Juniper Research believes these technologies are performing.
Based on Juniper Research’s unrivalled in-house knowledge of the mobile messaging market and our substantial research portfolio, each technology is scored on various factors such as its capabilities, forecasted growth, revenue generation and ability to solve market challenges.
We score all technologies based on whether they meet or fail expectations; if a technology is above the line, our analysts believe it exceeds expectations, whereas a technology placed below the line is failing.
The Tech Horizon for mobile messaging technologies is shown below.
RCS business messaging has been identified as a major moving technology for mobile messaging. Aside from Apple’s increasing support of RCS technology over iOS smartphones, Juniper Research believes CPaaS platforms’ focus on customer interaction use cases rather than simple termination for notifications, will be a key driver in the growth in RCS business messaging.”
The Top 3 ‘Major Movers’ in Mobile Messaging
Whilst the Tech Horizon gives insight into various technologies at a point in time, it also looks to the future of the market. For each Tech Horizon, Juniper Research will identify the top 3 ‘Major Movers’ that we believe will significantly impact the messaging market over the next 12 months through innovation, new business models, or increased customer satisfaction.
In the Tech Horizon, the pink bubbles represent where Juniper Research believe these technologies will be in 12 months.
In this edition of the Tech Horizon, we have identified the following technologies:
- Number Verification APIs
- Conversational AI
- RCS Business Messaging
The global mobile messaging market has been turbulent in the last 24 months and has created substantial scope for disruption from technologies and service provision. For example, fraud over SMS networks, such as artificially inflated traffic (AIT), has impacted the demand from enterprises for SMS traffic. Last year, Juniper Research estimated that over 40% of SMS business messaging traffic was for one-time passwords (OTPs) globally; a substantial proportion of demand.
Number Verification APIs
However, as this transactional traffic, such as delivery notifications, migrates away from SMS channels, CPaaS channels must remain vigilant as to which channels this demand will go to. Given the continuing levels of digital transformation, Juniper Research does not believe that demand for user authentication is going to diminish – just migrate to the most cost-effective channel. As a result, we have also identified number verification APIs as a key moving technology in 2025.
These APIs enable different software applications to communicate over a telecoms network, allowing enterprises to leverage the phone number to silently authenticate a user; minimising user interaction for authentication processes. Juniper Research expects a substantial amount of this traffic to migrate to this channel as more operators support it, most notably in Europe.
Conversational AI
Juniper Research believes that conversational AI will grow substantially over 2025. This growth will come from enterprises wishing to implement conversational capabilities into their communications stacks; driven partly by the emergence of RCS as a viable long-term marketing channel. Additionally, the declining cost of implementing AI will further boost this adoption.
Whilst many discuss the ‘AI bubble’, Juniper Research believes that the technology is now so pervasive in many technology markets, that there is no metaphorical bubble to burst; it’s so well established and provides real-world benefits, that the next stage of AI is differentiation of service. For mobile messaging, we expect the technology to become well established amongst CPaaS messaging stacks, with leading players transforming into channels for AI implementation.
RCS Business Messaging
RCS business messaging has been identified as a leading major moving technology for mobile messaging. Aside from Apple’s increasing support of RCS technology over iOS smartphones, Juniper Research believes CPaaS platforms’ focus on customer interaction use cases rather than simple termination for notifications, will be a key driver in the growth in RCS business messaging.
RCS technology has a much broader set of capabilities in terms of rich media, as well as brand verification tools; making the technology far more valuable to enterprises. In assessing the market, Juniper Research has noted a trend in which new enquiries for CPaaS platforms are increasingly being driven by marketing use cases, rather than from operational teams looking for termination of OTPs and multifactor authentication (MFA).
Indeed, Juniper Research has considered RCS as a technology that has underperformed against its expectations for several years. Whilst we have never viewed RCS as a total replacement for SMS, we have always seen it as an evolution of mobile messaging that includes rich media capabilities. As a result, we currently include it as underperforming in our Tech Horizon, but we expect RCS to move above the line by the end of the year as more enterprises leverage it for client interaction.
RCS is expected to have substantial growth. By the end of this year, several countries including Canada, the USA, Germany, the UK and the US, are all expected to have more than 1 in 3 mobile subscribers actively receiving RCS messages. Globally, over 2 billion subscribers are expected to be actively using RCS, however this only represents 20% of the total addressable market.
Over the past decade, the foundation of the mobile messaging market has been SMS, and the demand for OTPs and MFA from enterprises. However, with the rise of alternatives, and growing support of RCS technology, there will be a shift to customer interaction use and marketing cases.
