Market Opportunity: Rich Communications Suite (RCS)

Market Opportunity: Rich Communications Suite (RCS)

Rich Communication Services (RCS) originally marketed by GSMA marks the transition of messaging and voice capabilities from Circuit Switched technology to an all-IP world. RCS and Voice over LTE (VoLTE) share the same IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) investment and leverage the same IMS capabilities.

For consumers, RCS has the potential to combine voice and SMS with instant messaging or chat, live video sharing and file transfer across all devices and networks. For enterprise customers, RCS represents an attractive alternative to the potential free-for-all with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as the corporate entity can employ a Corporate Owned and Personally Enabled (COPE) strategy to allow personalization while maintaining their own Corporate Dashboard for their company communications and applications.

The core feature/functionality of RCS is as follows:

• Enhanced Phonebook: service capabilities and enhanced contacts information such as presence and service discovery.
• Enhanced Messaging: enables a large variety of messaging options including chat, emoticons, location share and file sharing.
• Enriched Calls: enables multimedia content sharing during a voice call, video call and video sharing

This research evaluates RCS capabilities and market prospects within the context of market drivers for mobile networks operators, which is primarily the critical need to develop and deploy value-added services (VAS) on top of basic services such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE). This report analyzes RCS core and future feature/functionality and evaluates RCS use cases and value proposition.

The report also discusses the role and importance of third-parties including the implementation of various API relationships. The report additionally provides the reader with an understanding of the supporting technologies such as Service Delivery Platforms (SDP), IP Multimedia System (IMS), and supporting applications enablers such as presence detection and location determination capabilities.

Target Audience:

• Mobile network operators
• Value-added service providers
• Wireless device manufacturers
• Telecom infrastructure providers
• API providers and management companies
• Content providers and commerce companies
• LTE and IP Multimedia Subsystem integrators

Key Findings:

• RCS is a critical value-added service (VAS) for mobile network operators to deal with the onslaught of so called over-the-top (OTT) applications
• RCS will leverage presence and location to enable Dynamic Address Book (DAB) for a more pleasant and/or productive communications experience
• RCS will utilize API connections with a variety of third parties to support core features/functionality as well as next generation applications.
• RCS will leverage location, social, and mobile to enable comparative shopping, reference selling, and offers to make buying in the retail store more engaging and rewarding 

Inquire about this report: Market Opportunity: Rich Communications Suite (RCS)