For marketing customer service and simple communications mobile messaging is a technology with unmatched potential—if it weren’t for its complexity.

No matter how advanced a mobile app might be companies can fail to realize the concept’s full potential to minimize costs and drive new revenue. Marketers can be frustrated by the challenges that are inherent in development when reaching out from their business systems and interacting with customers at the handset.

The evolution of mobile apps however appears to be entering a development phase that is free of third-party services or high infrastructure costs. One of the most compelling advancements in mobile content delivery is IBM’s Optimized Mobile Messaging which arrives as a comprehensive solution to the many hindrances of mobile app operations.

With IBM’s Optimized Mobile Messaging companies can access secure and bi-directional near-real time interaction channels. These channels link directly to the customer on a branded mobile app which the client owns. Think of a straight connection to the most important person in business—the buyer—without any of the soaring costs or intricacy of traditional app development.

IBM positions this capability to eliminate the need for SMS/text messaging customer e-mail push notifications and other legacy technology without the recurring costs unreliability or lack of immediacy.

“This technology is all use case driven” said IBM’s Tim Henrion. “One of the biggest challenges our customers have is the ability to reach out from the back end to the handset in real time.”

The mobile messaging market continues to release new products with steady frequency. This year a broad range of vendors both niche and multi-market have introduced apps that use core and hot-button technologies to bring messaging marketing and advertisements to devices in commercial and cultural areas.

This summer Ogangi announced an update to its Messangi app which “adds multimedia resiliency and comprehensive reporting to standard push notifications. It provides outdoor and indoor location based omnichannel messaging for thousands of locations at the same time.”

OpenMarket a US mobile engagement service recently announced “the availability of US long code mobile messaging capabilities. By using long code capabilities enterprises can quickly launch mobile programs reach a broader audience and generate new revenue opportunities.”

Such releases signify the overall growth that analysts anticipate throughout mobile tech markets. For example Sandler Research recently predicted that the mobile valued-added services sector will grow with steady expansion by 2018.

IBM’s Optimized Mobile Messaging however seeks to renew the content delivery method offering an app that is distinct from other services. The effort has already equipped customers throughout several verticals with a faster and more direct messaging posture. Speed and avoidance of multi-party systems—and traditional mobile networks are cluttered with third-parties—are the aim.

Retail banking offers some examples of this concept’s field use. Henrion explains: “There’s a customer of ours a bank in Turkey who specifically wants to be able to replace the branch with the phone. [Their entire] product offering in retail banking is looked at as ‘What does it take to simulate on a mobile phone the traditional in-person interaction?’

“With everything from loans to securities sometime the bank is going to have to take an action to engage the user directly without having to go through an unreliable or third-party mechanism like a text message.”

The client can replace SMS with a direct communication channel which is controlled completely by the bank’s mobile user experience. “A lot of customers are frustrated by the lack of control they have in these situations.”

The technology is also deployed in the shipping field. Henrion describes a case involving a trucking manufacturer in Europe.

“One of the capability sets of this type of mobile messaging is publish and subscribe capability. The customer signs up for a particular service level to have some content delivered in real time to a vehicle in questionable wireless environments”—for example the vehicle is out of the coverage area.

“In a traditional app environment you’d stand up a content management system set up a security and authorization system” and every request for content by the truck would have to go through the system security with content pulled from the CMS.

“In this case they actually publish the content to the publish-subscribe messaging system so when you connect to the messaging system the app knows which topics you are allowed to subscribe to.

“The whole scenario of delivering content is now basically just publish-subscribe messaging: You get what you are authorized to subscribe to in real-time.” If the vehicle is an area of spotty connectivity the content flows as the network connection is reestablished.

“We’re looking at this from the perspective of ‘Let’s look at how enterprise applications are developed” Henrion concluded. “Why do we have to stand up a web tier just to give mobile apps access to enterprise data?’"

To learn more about IBM Optimized Mobile Messaging view the replay of Tim Henrion's webcast "Reduce costs increase interaction: IBM Optimized Mobile Messaging."