Airtel Partners with Google and Dotgoto Offer Upgraded SMS Experience in Nigeria

Nigerian brands now have easy access to over 50 million Airtel subscribers through RCS Business Messaging

Lagos, Nigeria and Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, USA - Leading telecommunications services provider, Airtel Nigeria, has announced a strategic partnership with Google and Dotgo®, a leading cloud communications and business messaging solutions provider, to offer upgraded SMS experience to enterprises and entrepreneurs in Nigeria.

The upgraded SMS experience will be delivered through RCS (Rich Communications Services), a part of the 5G technology and its features include pictures, audio, video, and presence, combined with enhanced security and encryption.

Commenting on the partnership, Ogo Ofomata, Director, Airtel Business, Airtel Nigeria, said: “Airtel Nigeria is pleased to partner with Google and Dotgo to offer Nigerian businesses, enterprises, entrepreneurs as well as individuals an innovative platform to connect, share, influence, engage and delight their various stakeholders. Airtel will continue to leverage on innovation and the latest technology to enrich the lives of our customers and empower them to realize their full potentials.”

 “The coming together of a carrier like Airtel and our partner Dotgo to roll out RCS business messaging services has transformed Nigeria into an ‘RCS Gold Country’, where every tier-1 carrier supports RCS. With Airtel coming on board, the RCS adoption in Nigeria has scaled newer heights,” said Jason Choy, Director, Partnerships, Communication Products at Google. 

 “With this partnership, Nigerian brands can look forward to the unleashing of a new paradigm in business messaging, where the end customer would be the ultimate beneficiary,” commentedFawole Babafemi Victor, Country Manager for Dotgo Nigeria.

RCS messages are delivered into native messaging apps such as Google Messages and Samsung Messages on Android phones. RCS Business Messages uses the richer and interactive features of RCS to enable branded and secure business messaging. As of today, RCS is available globally with over 600 M monthly active users. 

Under the partnership, Google will provide the cloud infrastructure for delivering the RCS messages to Airtel subscribers, including the Google Jibe RCS platform for business messaging while Dotgo would provide its MaaP (Messaging-as-a-Platform), integrated with Google’s Jibe RCS platform, along with complete managed services needed to operate and monetize RCS Business Messages.

The Dotgo MaaP is the industry’s leading solution for offering RBM services, pre-integrated with all the major RCS infrastructure providers. The Dotgo MaaP also supports common APIs, onboarding, and verification across multiple carriers in a country or a region, even when they are using different RCS infra providers.