No person sent any of these. A developer at the bank, the shop or the delivery app wrote a few lines of code. That code told a platform to send them. The platform did the rest. It found the right mobile operator for your number, delivered the message or connected the call, and reported back whether it reached your phone.
That platform is called communications platform as a service, or CPaaS. This Market Segment is about the companies that sell it. Their buyers are businesses and the developers who work for those businesses. You, the person receiving the message, never deal with these companies. The business pays them, and you just get the message.
Two things make this a business:
Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.
This Market Segment has two sub-segments:
The other end of the same traffic, where businesses talk to their customers through contact centres and chatbots, is in Industry Vertical 15, Customer service and CX.
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- The Indian messaging houses
Take the bank OTP from the start of this Market Segment. The bank's developer can send it with one API call, the same way they would call any other web service. This idea started in the United States and Europe around 2008: put a phone network behind a web API, so a developer can send a text, make a call or verify a phone number with a few lines of code.
Twilio created this category. It currently posts no software engineering jobs in India, so it is not covered. The companies here are the ones that followed. Some of them started out as telecom companies, selling phone calls or running their own phone networks.
Two companies covered in other Market Segments also sell these APIs:
This is why Ericsson bought
Back to the bank OTP. Instead of a global platform, many Indian banks send their OTPs through an Indian messaging aggregator. Global platforms sometimes hand their Indian messages to one too.
Long before the term CPaaS was coined, Indian banks and online shops needed to send millions of SMS a day. A group of Indian companies grew up to do this. They held the connections to Airtel, Jio and Vi. They paid each operator a bulk price for every message delivered to its users, and charged businesses a little more per message. Each business also got a report showing whether each message was delivered. These companies are called aggregators.
That business has since moved on to WhatsApp Business, RCS and voice, and the aggregators have moved with it. RCS (Rich Communication Services) is an upgraded form of SMS. It is not the same as MMS, the older picture message, which could carry an image but little else and was rarely used by businesses. RCS works more like a chat app: it can show images, buttons and the business's verified name. So the same company that once sent your bank's OTP now often runs its WhatsApp conversations too.
Some of the largest aggregators operating in India, Tanla, Gupshup, Kaleyra and Infobip, are not covered in this Market Segment. Karix, which used to be Tanla's brand for selling to businesses, is covered in Market Segment 13.1, Marketing automation and customer engagement platforms
The aggregators' growth no longer comes from sending more SMS. It comes from running the whole conversation on WhatsApp and RCS: the chatbot, the product catalogue and the payment, all inside the chat.
Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What business communications hires for.