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Given MSN's slow approach to developing the MIM market in Latin America, it will be interesting tosee if Telefonica's strategy of repackaging Personal IM as SMS 2.0 -like they are doing in Spain- will work in Latin America.It is no secret that operators in Latin America have triedfor several years to sign an agreement with MSN for Mobile Instant Messaging with no success. Until 2006, only Movistar Chile and Argentina were able to sign such an agreement and that was for a WAP based solution.GSMA is developing an open solution, with interconnection between operators. In Europe operators have already deployed such a solution, this seems like an appropriate strategy for the Latin American market.GSMA has also stated that it eventually wants to have interconnectivity with portals. This makes us wonder how long can MSN stand the pressure? With two huge groups, Telefonica and America Movil, dominating the landscape in one of the fastest growing mobile markets, it shouldn't be difficult for them to successfully launch an SMS 2.0-like solution that gives subscribers the benefits of Instant Messaging as an enhancement to a messaging solution that has already proven to be very successful and is in need of an upgrade.Operators shouldn't be afraid of the stigma so-called"Operator IM" has. The belief is that to launch such a service,they'd have to "create" a community wheras MSN and other Portalsalready have one.Operators already have such a community, and America Movil and Telefonica each have more than 100M members. The question shouldn't be whether MSN will allow operators access to their community, but whether operators will allow MSN and other portals to enter the mobile arena.

About a month ago, GSM Association issued a press release announcing Personal Instant Messaging Services Go Live in Asia with the commercial launch of IM in India (Aircel, Bharti Airtel, BPL Mobile, BSNL, Idea, MTNL, Reliance Telecom, Spice and Vodafone-Essar) and Malaysia (DiGi Telecommunications and Maxis), which allows customers of those networks to send each other instant messages using their mobile phones.
According to GSMA, more than 40 mobile operators worldwide are developing Personal IM services.
This initiative has taken root in Latin America with Telefonica Movistar leading the way with their SMS 2.0 initiative. SMS 2.0 is Telefonica's commercial name for the same service, which GSMA calls Personal Instant Messaging. GSMA has been working hard for the last two years to support the development of the technical and commercial framework for this service.
In Latin America, Telefonica Movistar is already looking into deploying this service in different operations. Brazil operators are also looking into this service, it is expected they will launch during 2008.
It seems that MSN's lack of interest in the region will end up helping GSMA's initiative, as we had mentioned previously (see here and here). GSMA has mentioned in the past that the first step is interconnection between networks but eventually they want to extend this interconnection to include portals such as MSN, AOL and Yahoo.
While Personal Instant Messaging still carries the stigma of failed launches, the work done by GSMA seems to have all the elements in place to become one of the most successful VAS services. After several years of trying to gain MSN's approval for the service, it seems that operators in Latin America have found the perfect formula to bring messaging to the next level.