"Senders have to pay to send messages, so there is much less spam than with e-mail," Akehurst said. "This in turns leads to much higher readership of messages sent via SMS than e-mail."

Akehurst also believes SMS can reduce the cost of an organization's mobile service expenditure, particularly for internal communication.

"Some 30 to 40 percent of the average business phone bill is on landline to mobile phones," he said. "Of all calls to mobile phones, an estimated 50 percent go through to voicemail. That means there is a cost to make the call, a cost to pick up the voicemail, and then a cost to call back, as most of the time the message is simply asking for a call back.

"With SMS a brief message can be delivered instantly, and is read at the first available opportunity, thereby substantially reducing costs."Beep Interactive's smsGeezer allows SMS messaging to be integrated into a desktop - including Excel spreadsheets - or Web application. "The surge in the use of SMS for business applications has been a little later than I would have anticipated given the massive surge in SMS for personal use," Akehurst said. "Over the last 12 months, however, it seems to be growing at a rapid rate."

Akehurst said SMS-enabled applications can be developed with "intermediate" programming skills, but users need to be wary of the many poor quality service providers and the coverage of telcos.