Why Are Carriers Not Supporting Developers?

It filled me with great sadness when I visited the BlueVia Developer Portal yesterday to find that all developer APIs have been removed from the site. I used to work with the BlueVia team and for some reason we were unable to make a business case out of supporting access to Telefonica resources to developers.

I had been campaigning without success to expose developer APIs to all DT resources - something that Developer Garden does for developers who want to engage with DT's German customers - for ages before moving to BlueVia. BlueVia for me was a chance to succeed at providing simple access to carrier assets i.e. SMS and Voice services. We had limited success with BlueVia Voice in that we were able to launch a beta service to provide access to these services for a limited number of developers. Unfortunately I was not able to convince those that needed to be convinced that there was a business case that would support the necessary investment required to make the service profitable.

At the same time. companies like Nexmo on top of $4.83 million in funding are now expecting total revenue of around $40 million for calendar 2013. According to Crunchbase Nexmo:

Currently seven of the top ten messaging platforms rely on Nexmo to route SMS and Voice calls to over 200 countries globally. The Nexmo platform handles over 250 million messages a month, with 20 percent growth monthly.

Wondering what the monthly growth in Carrier SMS is? Well here's a hint, unfortunatly mobile carrier SMS is peaking and starting to decline :-(. As I've long campaigned carriers have not innovated on SMS since it's invention, other than offering increasing bundles of SMS to Customers. It is developers who will lead any growth within SMS usage, but they will only do this via services that provide simple access to it. It is only the OTT players who are providing this access.

Another example is Twilio - who were on track for 50 million in revenue for 2013.

While Mobile Carriers are failing to expose their assets to developers, OTT players continue to grow and engage with developer hearts and minds.

Ho hum.

Cheers

m