The importance of text messaging popularly known as SMS will grow further and will now evolve into next generation messaging services, says a new report from Frost & Sullivan.

The new ecosystem will allow text messaging with contextual presence and location information as well as a unified identity for messaging that provides a user’s status, personal information, updates and messages in one user interface.

 “SMS’s massive success and staying power give the industry valuable insight into its transition to next-generation messaging,” explains Ronald Gruia, Principal Telecom Analyst for Frost & Sullivan, which conducted interviews with 18 leading telecom providers across major global regions and with strategic industry professionals.

Globally operators are now starting to employ a number of approaches to compensate the ongoing commoditization and pricing pressure in the VAS industry. Strategies include the introduction of targeted mobile advertising, tiered services, and the opening of interfaces via APIs for third-party developers.

According to Gruia, simple accessibility, ubiquitous network interoperability, ease of use, affordability and price predictability for text messaging will be areas driving the evolution of messaging services to next generation platform.

From an operator point of view the areas of concern remain avoiding commoditization, enhancing profitability, capitalizing on new capabilities. Operators feel that the year 2012 is expected to be an inflection point year where most of the focus will go to SIP application servers, messaging gateways, service brokers, and other IP infrastructure and/or enablers.

The report has been exclusively licensed to Comverse.