There may not be much room at the top of the mobile e-mail service food chain, but there seems to be plenty of opportunity below.
Nokia Corp. last week finally threw up its hands and pulled the plug on Intellisync, its enterprise-targeted wireless e-mail solution, after failing to steal many high-end users away from Research In Motion Ltd. and Microsoft Corp. The Finnish company said it will stop developing and marketing the service, opting instead to integrate its devices and applications with technology from third-party companies with their own services.
“We have very strong relationships with industry-leading enterprise technology partners such as Cisco and Microsoft, as well as a broad range of operator and retail channel partners,” Niklas Savander, Nokia’s EVP of Services and Software, said in a prepared statement. “Together with them, we will use our expertise in devices as well as the combined channel footprint and customer base to deliver a range of unbeatable end-to-end offerings for business.”
But while Nokia will continue to build devices and services for the business sector, it continued to move aggressively toward consumers last week with the acquisition of OZ, a Montreal-based mobile messaging company, for an undisclosed sum.
The Canadian outfit gained a foothold in the early days of wireless instant messaging before expanding into consumer e-mail services, and has toyed with the kinds of social-networking features that Nokia hopes to leverage with its Ovi service.
Tough business
Nokia’s move to drop its enterprise e-mail service marks the end of a three-year effort to compete with RIM, which continues to dominate the enterprise mobile e-mail playground. Nokia bought its way onto the field with the $430 million acquisition of Intellisync Corp., but couldn’t gain much traction among businesses with its branded offering, said David Ferris of Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based market research firm that specializes in Internet messaging.
“RIM is much more of a challenge today for the Intellisync stuff, while Windows Mobile will probably be a threat in the future,” Ferris observed. “I think RIM’s got this runaway success, then you’ve got Microsoft as a constant lurker there, trying to get its technology very widely deployed.”
And Microsoft will be fairly successful in the next few years, if recent figures from J. Gold Associates are to be believed. The market research firm polled more than 400 North American and Western European companies and predicted Windows Mobile’s market share as a “primary platform” will grow over the next three years, increasing from 22.5% to 28.6%. BlackBerry is expected to remain the dominant player but will lose a little ground, falling from 65.5% to 59.3%, while Apple Inc.’s iPhone – the only newcomer expected to make a dent – will see a 16% market share as a primary platform in 2011.
“It is unlikely that the market will consolidate anytime soon,” said Jack Gold, “but we are seeing company preferences for specific mobile platforms. We expect mobile deployments to continue at a rapid pace.”
On the cheap
Many of those deployments may be in the form of lesser-known – and cheaper – platforms with standardized protocols, however. Surprisingly, players like Funambol, Isode and Synchronica are enjoying uptake not just among consumers but are beginning to “sell behind the firewall” to corporations looking for ways to expand their mobile communications without unduly expanding their budgets.
Funambol, for instance, allows businesses to download its open source-based solution “Community Edition” and use it internally free, providing a kind of testing ground where the company can observe deployments and benefit from tweaks I.T. departments make to the software. Funambol leverages what it gleans from the enterprise space by selling the software to carriers as a white-label, consumer-focused mobile e-mail offering.
“When you go into the consumer space you really have 2 billion phones that change every day. How do you address that worldwide?” asked Funambol CEO and founder Fabrizio Capobianco.
“The enterprise, for us, is where the open-source crowd is, and they are testing on a daily basis our clients against their servers worldwide. For us it is a key element to grow the amount of features and the number of devices we can support.”
Which is not to say that Funambol and its brethren can compete with RIM and other high-end services, of course. RIM’s dominance stems from an impressive coupling of hardware and applications, and Microsoft appears well positioned to continue to expand its popular Exchange service to wireless.
As corporations tighten their belts in the midst of an uncertain economy, though, the enterprise sector may increasingly look to the cheaper, lowest-common-denominator kinds of services that players with standardized protocol-based offerings can provide.
“I think the way we get into the enterprise is that the enterprise comes looking for us,” Capobianco claimed.
“They have RIM and they realize the other 99% of the people (in the company) don’t have a BlackBerry phone, and the CFO is saying, ‘Nobody else gets a company phone’ because of the cost.”
