AWS Gets Global Two-Way SMS Feature

Apparently, the cloud giant had launched the two-way texting feature last week, but never properly got to announcing it officially. Now, though, AWS has made its global SMS messaging feature official.

And it is calling it Pinpoint.

Curious name.

As Randall Hunt, a software engineer at AWS, details, Amazon Pinpoint lets developers send highly targeted push notifications so that they can stay connected to their audience. He also confirmed that the cloud giant actually got this service live last week:

“SMS is an area of continued investment for AWS so you can expect to see more advances and improvements as customers give us feedback on these new features.”

Thanks to the two-way texting capability, Pinpoint users have the ability to provision both short codes and 10-digit phone numbers that can be used to send inbound messages to an SNS topic.

This launch is another in the long line of services that put Amazon Web Services in direct competition with a previous partner. In the past, AWS had partnered with cloud-based communications provider Twilio for text messaging capabilities.

Luckily, Twilio has now moved beyond the stack, and broadened its platform and ecosystem.

Regardless, its shares dropped nearly 5% after this announcement from AWS.