Aether Systems Inc. added yet another tier to its ever-expanding services platform last week by partnering with Critical Path Inc., one of the largest messaging solutions providers in the industry.
Critical Path provides messaging solutions, as well as such collaborative applications as calendaring, fax notification and other services, to both corporations and Internet service providers.
“We believe we needed a more solid, broad offering of messaging services,” said Evan Deoul, vice president of wireless Web services at Aether.
Rather than create these services in-house, Aether decided to act as the wireless front end for Critical Path’s services.
“The Critical Path partnership provides everything we need in this area to serve our existing customer base as well as reach Critical Path’s 100 million users.”
By providing the wireless front end to Critical Path’s messaging customers, Aether gains the strength of Critical Path’s distribution channels, both on the direct side, as well as through its various indirect channel programs. In addition, Aether establishes a relationship with this customer base which it can use to upsell other Aether services later on.
Just as Aether was concerned with gaining a greater presence in messaging, Critical Path had increasing concerns over getting into wireless.
“Critical Path’s vision is to offer true anytime, anywhere, any device connection to messaging,” said Lee Llevano, vice president of wireless solutions at Critical Path. He said the 25 million wireless users the company claims today are all short message service users in Europe only. The company wanted to expand into the U.S. and is doing so through the Aether relationship.
The duo’s wireless messaging application operations can take several forms, from Critical Path simply reselling the BlackBerry solution Aether licensed from Research In Motion Ltd., to more customized customer integration work.
The two have technological and geographical synergies as well. Aether primarily is a messaging firm. The Aether Intelligent Messaging Platform is used by many to extend data to various types of text-based devices, such as palmtop computers and two-way messaging devices. The company has no products for extending to text-enabled phones, for instance. Critical Path, however, has created a messaging conversion interface for translating its messaging services to various Wireless Markup Language and Hypertext Markup Language browsers, which Aether will host at its network operating center, according to the agreement.
In addition, the two complement each other internationally. Aether is involved in a data services hosting joint venture with Reuters in Europe called Sila Communications, with offices throughout Europe and Singapore, while Critical Path has a global presence in 10 European and Asian countries.
The companies currently are visiting their customers together and determining the wireless messaging needs of each to draw a road map of the technological and marketing issues they must conquer going forward. The technical integration between the two companies has begun, and they expect beta trials by the fourth quarter with commercial launch sometime next year.
At that time, the companies said both Aether and Critical Path customers will benefit simultaneously. Aether said it will focus on its primary customers first, while Critical Path envisions a cross-section of customer deployment.
“We’ve been getting tremendous response from all the customers visited,” Llevano said. “In the end, it will be a matter of how we prioritize it, not whether there’s a demand leader.”
