News

Nexmo Contributes to Enhanced SMS Messaging via AWS Cloud

• By David Ramel
• 07/20/2016

Global communications company Nexmo announced it was working with Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) to provide worldwide SMS (text) messaging via the Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).

"Nexmo's cloud communications platform extends the innovative capabilities of the Amazon SNS suite to help meet the growing demand for SMS-based communication from customers around the world," the company said in a statement last week.

"AWS is collaborating with Nexmo given Nexmo's global reach, quality assurance and capability to send billions of messages every day," the company continued. "Nexmo has built one of the largest global networks of carriers, 650 in total, and has the infrastructure to seamlessly address technical, regional and compliance-related limitations on communications around the world. In addition, Nexmo's proprietary Adaptive Routing algorithm routinely tracks millions of data points to immediately determine the fastest and most reliable route to deliver messages."

The collaboration resulted in a recent expansion of Amazon SNS that was detailed in blog post on the AWS Mobile Development site.

"Worldwide SMS delivery means that you can now send SMS text messages directly to mobile phone numbers in more than 200 countries," said AWS' Arjun Cholkar in the post. "Along with this expansion, SNS also enabled default 'opt-in' of recipient phone numbers. This creates more possibilities for SMS messages, such as those needed for multi-factor authentication (MFA) or one-time passcodes."

The post outlines the former capabilities of the AWS service and the new enhanced service, marked by global support vs. the previous U.S.-only functionality. It's also offered in more regions, includes the aforementioned opt-in capability and features various other improvements.

"AWS provides a rich set of services for developers for building mobile applications that are secure, robust and scalable -- ranging from Identity, Sync, and Serverless Backends to APIs," said AWS exec Simon Poile in the Nexmo statement. "We are pleased to work with companies like Nexmo to help mobile developers to reach their customers effectively via text messaging, which remains one of the most popular forms of communication across the world. AWS is able to offer such capabilities through a single API, making it easy for developers to add such capability to their mobile applications."