What's an "Originator"?

Like anything technically based, IT people love jargon - I know when I worked in the mechanical and electrical engineering field there were heaps of jargon terms for lots of things, however the people you dealt with were generally technical people themselves, so everything was understood and there was little requirement to educate. So if we talked about about the clearance of a bearing being standard, C2 or C3, people knew what you were saying. IT is different because people in IT are delivering their products to everyone, technical astute or not.

It's not a criticism, but just the way things are - like a salesperson for an ink jet printer may one day be speaking to Systems Manager and the next be speaking to my dad who wants to replace the home printer, the same I find is true for SMS.

Some days I'm speaking with Systems Managers, Developers or business managers who aren't technically educated in the same way, and one of the terms we use in our industry can sound more complicated than it needs to be - originators.

An originator is basically whom the message appears as coming from. That could be a number, like a land line number, a mobile phone number, etc... or a name like "Chris" or "Esendex".

Many providers use different terms to mean the same thing, like "stamping the message", or "branding the message" and "dynamic originators" (which means that the originator can be changed at will).

With SMS, for originators, the standard is usually an alpha numerical originator up to 11 characters long - alpha numerical meaning a combination of letters and/or numbers, and is 11 characters because through out the world most phone numbers are not longer than 11 digits, there are exceptions, but it's done to 11 characters so that a consistent service can be provided, after all there's little sense in allowing 13 or more characters when the local networks will only cut the end of the originator off.

So just to clarify, when people talk about originators, they're talking about the label, name or number that the messages appears to have come from.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
C