For years Message Systems has pitched its industrial-strength Momentum messaging platform at IT departments, for the responsibility for overseeing the complexities of pushing out large volumes of email and SMS texts falls on them.
But after over a decade on the market, the Maryland company put together a bundled turnkey solution that it believes will catch the eye of marketing departments instead for its ability to be easily managed without IT.
Customer Conversation Hub, revealed Tuesday, is a fully integrated Linux/Solaris-based system that includes Momentum, a database for holding content, and the company’s management applications — Adaptive Delivery, for optimizing email delivery; Message Central, for creating, scheduling and sending messages; and Message Scope, for looking into message streams to find problems with delivery.
“We’ve realized we could put together a solution set that you can roll out to just about anyone and hit the ground running,” said Carrie Scott, the company’s director of product marketing.
Momentum alone invariably needs system integration with an organizations content management system or customer relationship management system, she said. But CCH is a self-contained solution “so you don’t necessarily need to rely on IT to deploy your messages. Anyone can do it with the messenger origination system.”
It is aimed at organizations that don’t need the full set of capabilities of Momentum.
For that reason, CCH will “likely” appeal more to the business side of organizations, she said.
On the other hand, John Pinson, Message System’s senior manage of content marketing, said “we’re always going to be a company that works directly with IT to get things implemented.”
But, he pointed out, once installed many problems – like high email return rates – can be solved through CCH without the need of the IT department.
The advantage with CCH, the company says, is that it helps organizations leverage digital messages for keeping in touch with customers.
Message Systems Canadian customers include Montreal magazine and weekly newspaper publisher TC Transcontinental, which pushes out thousands of email newsletter notifications a week.
Customers include Facebook and Paypal, as well as telecom carriers and internet providers..
CCH is sold either direct or though partners. Scott said pricing depends on a number of factors including the number of licences, size of the organization and the volume of mail being sent. Generally, she added, pricing starts “in the low six figures.”
Mike Hillier, the company’s Calgary based director of sales engineering said an installation of CCH will need at least three servers — one for sending email, one for receiving mail and one for application administration. For a typical large customers six to eight servers would be needed.