Tanla to enable rich communication services on Airtel network
Digital communications service provider Tanla Platforms has partnered with Bharti Airtel to enable rich communication services (RCS) messaging for businesses.
The partnership, which follows a similar deal with Vodafone Idea, gives Tanla access to two major private telecom operators in the country.
Tanla currently processes around 35 billion RCS messages annually, or nearly 80% of India’s total RCS traffic. With Airtel’s partnership, the company’s overall RCS volumes could scale to 100 billion in two years, its estimates suggest.
“With over 500 million RCS users across India spanning all major operators, and with continued global growth and investment in RCS, the channel represents one of the largest opportunities for enterprises to connect with customers at scale through next-generation messaging,” said Tanla Platforms chief executive Uday Reddy.
RCS is a messaging standard developed by global telecom industry body GSMA in 2007 to replace SMS and include rich features like read receipts, file sharing, group chats, location sharing and encryption. The goal was to create a universal standard for carrier-based messaging that could compete with internet-based apps like WhatsApp, iMessage and WeChat.
Currently, Google Messages is the main driver of RCS adoption, accounting for 1 billion messages daily. All three major telcos in India—Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea—have now embraced RCS.
According to Mordor Intelligence, the India CPaaS (communication-platform-as-a-service) market is estimated to grow to $3.06 billion by 2030 from $1.01 billion in 2025. Gartner had earlier projected the market to reach $3.2 billion by 2028 from $1.3 billion in 2023 in India.
WhatsApp and RCS are set to reach a combined market of $1.6 billion and capture 50% of the value share of India’s commercial messaging market, Gartner had said.
A joint report by Omdia and Infobip projects RCS alone to account for $544 million in revenue by 2029, generated from 21 billion messages from India. This would be 25% of the RCS revenues in Asia and Oceania.
“With one of the world’s largest mobile subscriber bases and a dominant Android ecosystem, India has the scale to become one of the largest RBM markets globally,” Reddy said.
For telecom operators, it is an opportunity to evolve beyond declining SMS revenues and create a next-generation enterprise messaging business,” he added.
The industry is also closely watching the impact of Apple’s adoption of RCS, which is expected to make the messaging standard ubiquitous across both Android and iPhone devices and significantly increase the addressable market. However, Apple and Google have yet to fully interconnect their RCS infrastructure in India.
