S.O.S. – The Wild Messenger Marketplace Has Chatbot Developers Calling for a Single Operating System

Featured article by Alexander Vityaz, CEO, Corezoid

There’s little doubt that chatbots will have an immense impact on the user experiences that businesses are able to offer, and that customers will both enjoy and come to expect. However, the big question of which messenger platforms will deliver these chatbots has yet to be settled, and as the landscape stands now, there are more widely-used messengers out there than most companies could possibly support with separate bots.

Even considering only the leading platforms of the moment – those with userbases above or approaching one billion users – leaves a daunting number of options: WeChat, QQ, What’s App, Facebook Messenger, Apple iMessage, Skype, Viber, SnapChat, Line, Slack, and Kik all make this list. These still represent only a fraction of the messenger platforms available, and that’s not to mention communication services such as SMS, email, and Twitter, which also serve large audiences. Taking all this in, businesses face a considerable challenge when it comes to deciding which portions of this vast ecosystem to bet their finite resources on.

To understand the fragmented messenger marketplace, it’s useful to look back at the chaotic mobile operating system space at the dawn of smartphones as a precedent. At the time, as many as ten different OS choices split the marketplace and thwarted any sense of certainty for businesses investing in the technology. Readers with strong memories might remember when Blackberry OS, Symbian, Maemo, MeeGo, Bada, Windows Mobile, iOS, and Android fiercely competed for market share. This market eventually consolidated around a few players that offered the best functionality.

In the case of messengers today, almost all of the most popular services have made bot platforms or have them on the way, and the number of viable messenger options is into the triple digits. Imagining a world where each business tries to reach every one of these audiences with a separately developed and supported bot – or, one step further, a world where intense competition all but requires this level of dedication to chatbots – and it could well be the case that there aren’t enough developers in the world to keep up with the demand. In reality, businesses must be selective and wise in the messenger platforms they choose to develop bots for.

So, how should a business make this decision today? It’s true that platforms are arriving that allow a company to develop and deploy bots across multiple messenger platforms with streamlined effort; however, these tools address only the narrow task of bot development, which acts as a layer over a business’s back-end rather than enabling developers to best deliver functionality that requires access to core business processes. In a competitive environment where the capabilities of a chatbot – what it enables the user to do – will be the most important differentiator, facility with core systems is a key (and perhaps as yet underrated) factor.

Businesses that enter the emerging chatbot market with the correct IT strategy will hold an advantage. To develop that strategy, new entrants should examine the following concerns. How can bots that communicate with core systems and deliver core business functionality best be developed? Where should bots be hosted? How rapidly can the logic of a deployed bot be altered and optimized. How can a bot’s performance be measured and analyzed? And finally, how can a fully capable chatbot be deployed across multiple platforms?

One desirable solution to the issue of the fragmented messenger marketplace is for a single operating system for bots to emerge, which could be used to create, optimize and host chatbots for deployment on any front end or messenger platform. Such an OS would utilize a true digital core, able to connect chatbots to every internal and external service within a business’s purview, therefore making bots capable of reacting to any users’ needs with real-time responsiveness. By combining full access to business processes with an event-driven architecture that prepares responses to any possible anticipated scenario, bots created in this OS will be able to follow through on just about any user request, made across any messenger or communication channel.

For businesses, success in the age of chatbots goes beyond simply deploying bots to the top few messenger platforms. It will require the delivery of highly-capable bots that can reach into the depths of the functionality a business offers to distinguish itself in the marketplace, as well as broad deployment across the messenger landscape.

Alexander Vityaz is the CEO of Corezoid, a cloud process engine.