Airtel Nigeria has announced a strategic partnership with Google and Dotgo, to offer upgraded Short Message Service (SMS) experience to enterprises and entrepreneurs in the country.

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

Director, Airtel Business, Airtel Nigeria, Ogo Ofomata, said this in a statement on Wednesday in Lagos.

Ofomata said that Airtel Nigeria was pleased to partner Google and Dotgo to offer Nigerian businesses, enterprises, entrepreneurs and individuals an innovative platform to connect, share, influence, engage and delight their various stakeholders.

“Airtel will continue to leverage innovation and the latest technology to enrich the lives of our customers and empower them to realise their full potential,” Ofomata said.

Mr Jason Choy, Director, Partnerships and Communication Products, Google, said the coming on board of Airtel had made RCS adoption in Nigeria scale newer heights.

“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,” he said.

The Country Manager, Dotgo Nigeria, Mr Oluseyi Akinnibosun, said that the partnership would unleash a new paradigm in business messaging, where the end customer would be the ultimate beneficiary.

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 million monthly active users.

Under the partnership, Google will provide the cloud infrastructure for delivering the RCS messages to Airtel subscribers.

It includes 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 monetise RCS Business Messages.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Dotgo is aleading cloud communications and business messaging solutions provider.