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Intellisync Buy Gives Nokia An Email Edge |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Wednesday, 23 November 2005 |
Mobile communications company, Nokia, will significantly boost its wireless email credentials as it tries to push email into the business mainstream following the announcement it will acquire email middleware vendor Intellisync.
The US$430 transaction will allow Nokia to deliver what it describes as the industry’s most complete offering for the development, deployment and management of mobility in the enterprise.
Nokia has its own fledgling push email solution, Nokia Business Centre, which it plans to launch onto the Australian market in the New Year. It also works with a number of different third party software solutions including support for Blackberry Connect on its 9300 smartphone and 9500 Communicator in August this year for the Australian market.
Blackberry Connect currently dominates the push email sector laying claim to some 3.5 million email services globally.
However, the company’s Nokia Business Centre currently only supports the 60 Series phones from Nokia. The addition of Intellisync’s platform-independent carrier-grade and enterprise focused solutions which connect to virtually any device.
There is a huge potential for vendors who can dominate this emerging mobile middleware space, either at the device level or with applications, platforms and middleware. The embryonic email market is seen as a good place to start.
The market potential is huge with more than 680 million mobile devices capable of doing email already out in the hands of potential users, but only about 6 million of them are using mobile email to date.
However, with Research in Motion firmly entrenched in the US and Microsoft keenly focused on the same market potential, plus a handful of third part solutions for in-house enterprise platforms such as OneBridge GoodLink, Seven Mobile and Visto Mobile there’s plenty of competition.
While Nokia Enterprise Solutions, VP David Petts, admits that while software is an important revenue stream the company’s main game is to promote mobile handheld solutions in order to boost handset sales, the market for mobile middleware is set to boom with IDC predicting the market has already reached half a billion US dollars, and is now predicting this could triple over the next four or five years.
IDC Australia analyst Warren Chaisatien says roughly one third of Australian businesses have adopted wireless solutions, mostly for email and personal information management, but he predicts that there is more to come.
Chaisatien believes the market will soon move to putting more complex applications on mobile devices with CRM and sales force automation two obvious front runners. Finally in a third phase, Chaisatien sees mobile commerce taking off in the same way e-commerce has developed on the wired Web.
This point is not missed by phone giant. Petts said the recently released push email system is “a platform approach” and sees the solution developing over the next two to three years to become a SIP server and Application platform for converged collaborative services.
Getting mindshare in the IT reseller space in imperative if Nokia is to become a player in this market and the Intellisync brand, intellectual property and staff will deliver immediate street cred. However, Petts says, the company already has plenty of runs on the channel board.
“We do have access to the IT channel,” said Petts pointing to the company’s firewall business and growing relationships with the likes of Cisco and Avaya in the VoIP space.
Petts said Nokia intends to “leverage that security footprint to the extent that it can recruit more it resellers” to the fold.
To that end, Nokia has already signed Brightpoint as a local distributor with integrators CSC and Alphawest both keen to get selling push email solutions.
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