I remember a discussion with a friend sometime back about how the Indian handset market, which until now had been dominated by certain players, is suddenly seeing a surge in competitors leading to reduction in prices. Moreover, these handset players are focussing on apps and softwares as the next set of inventories to make profits. Nokia is heavily focussing on the Ovi stores while Apple, blackberry app stores are creating news every day.
This discussion made me think about txtWeb and the vast potential an SMS based app store has. Whenever I visit the txtWeb app store, I see a large variety of apps aiming at solving some critical problem for mobile users. There are apps for entertainment, health, finance, jobs etc. But one core category where I see immense opportunity for SMS based apps is apps for enterprise, i.e. apps for companies and corporations to help them in their day to day businesses. I see this emerging opportunity for 2 main reasons:
1) Many companies have large number of field workers (e.g. Shell, DHL, LnT etc) and more often they don’t have their personal workstations but share a common one. Hence communicating with them through emails or enterprise collaboration softwares becomes a problem.
2) A majority of these field workers have regular handsets that support SMS (and not the smart phones or business phones). Hence SMS based apps become a useful way for information exchange, collaboration and work management.
Enterprises usually have immense internal collaboration and communication needs and they invest heavily into it. Many platforms like Social Text, Salesforce’s chatter and Yammer thrive upon the enterprise collaboration needs. SMS based apps for enterprise can make things like information exchange, internal collaboration, email management and a lot more, simpler for field employees. Just think of SMS apps where field managers can send group SMS to all field workers in their native languages. Sales teams (or technical support teams) can push new leads to Salesmen (technicians) in a particular location. Field workers can fill their payroll data through SMS. As you can see, the opportunities are really immense!
What more ways do you think SMS apps can have a positive impact on enterprise needs? Are there more players in this space who have already created enterprise SMS apps? Do share your ideas with us.
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