 Comverse became a market leader in voice messaging software and boomed during the late 1990s with the surge in mobile phone use . Much of its market focus was on wireless operators and overseas companies , and it gained a formidable position in the worldwide mobile voicemail management market . The growth coincided with SMS text messages becoming popular ; the first big application for SMS was as a notification mechanism to tell a wireless subscriber that voicemail were stored in a voicemail box . Comverse expanded this application into a full @-@ blown short message service center ( SMSC ) , which receives , buffers , processes , and dispatches all SMS messages throughout a mobile network . Comverse branded and <unk> this as the Intelligent Short Message Service Center , or ISMSC . Typical of <unk> software , it ran on Unix @-@ based platforms , such as <unk> and later Linux . Comverse 's ISMSC found success as a lower @-@ price solution for lower @-@ traffic networks , where it competed with Logica 's <unk> solution . Other companies in the SMSC space included CMG and <unk> . ISMSC found considerable market penetration , exemplified by all six of Hong Kong 's wireless carriers using it . 
