Nokia Corp. continued its massive open mobile architecture standards push last week by signing up some of the world’s largest infrastructure and application server vendors, including BEA Systems Inc., Borland Software Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Oracle and Sun Microsystems Inc.
The move underscores Nokia’s hopes for the wireless enterprise market, which many in the industry see as a major and as-yet-unrealized opportunity. Nokia, which traditionally has taken a consumer-oriented approach, recently has made moves toward the corporate market-the company’s 9210 Communicator smart phone has been marketed toward business users in Europe, a move that will likely be repeated in its forthcoming release in the United States.
Nokia isn’t completely ignoring the consumer market, however. It last month rallied some of the world’s largest wireless carriers and manufacturers during the launch of its architecture initiative, including AT&T Wireless Services Inc., Cingular Wireless, Mmo2, NTT DoCoMo, Motorola Inc., Texas Instruments, NEC Corp., Toshiba Corp. and Symbian.
While Nokia’s recent standards efforts (the company has long been involved in a variety of wide-ranging standards groups) mainly are aimed at stabilizing the fractured wireless technology landscape, a possibly intended result has also been to put further pressure on software giant Microsoft Corp. Microsoft competes directly with Nokia’s IT partners in the infrastructure and application server market, and is also making inroads in Nokia’s wireless software market. In fact, Nokia is one of the witnesses against Microsoft in a rekindled antitrust battle.
Microsoft Director of Standards and Technology Michael Wehrs said Nokia’s standards push does not directly interfere with Microsoft’s wireless business. Nokia’s IT initiative announced last week centers around a mobile extension for Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition-based application servers. While Microsoft systems can run Java technology, the company prefers applications be developed specifically for its platform.
Nokia and its partners said using Java as a standard will lead to uniform application programming interfaces, allowing developers to easily incorporate wireless extensions into their applications. While some wireless manufacturers have embraced Java technology and are incorporating it into their handsets, notably Research In Motion Ltd. and Motorola Inc., the vast majority of today’s wireless devices are not Java capable.
“Open standards are a really, really important thing,” said Microsoft’s Wehrs, but he added that it’s not Microsoft’s strategy to standardize on any single technology or language. “Our particular approach is to run the native code.”
Wehrs said Nokia’s standards initiative was commendable but that Microsoft is far ahead of the mobile-phone giant.
The Strategis Group’s Christine Loredo has a slightly different take on the situation. She said Nokia is in fact ahead of the game, and is doing so by taking a page out of Microsoft’s play book.
Nokia is “opening up their systems,” she said. “Just like Microsoft did to the PC, they’re doing with the phone. They want to keep their claim on the mobile industry.”
Loredo applauded Nokia’s standards efforts, explaining that the company is looking to spur the enterprise market by smoothing out the technological landscape. Along with Java, Nokia and its partners plan to standardize on Third Generation Partnership Project-compliant technologies like WAP 2.0, xHTML, Multimedia Messaging Service and SyncML. Nokia said that, by following consistent global and open standards, the companies involved in the initiative can offer their customers a wide selection of different competitive-yet-interoperable products.
“They’re just creating a market for themselves,” Loredo said.
