... now finalised and the Finnish handset maker was now clearly focused on providing its customers with seamless access to email on the move.
Ollila added that Nokia Business Center, a software product enabling push email and other collaborative business applications, has already been sold to 40 companies in Europe. "We will be able to connect any device from any vendor and work with almost any data source and any network," Ollila said.
Apart from the flurry of vendor pronouncements, another clear sign of the intense competition in this area at the moment is the amount of litigation stacking up. RIM is currently caught up in a patent infringement case with patent-holding company NTP which could see the Canadian email leader's mobile business suspended in the US, although the High Courts recently ruled in RIM's favour in a case that could have had similar ramifications here,.p>
RIM announced last week that it has developed some "alternative" technology keep it systems running if it loses the NTP case, but much of the damage has already been done in terms of the company's profile and user's trust.
But RIM is not alone in facing legal woes. Several other players in this area including Microsoft, Good Technology and Seven have been sued by mobile technology company Visto for alleged patent infringement.Paul Hedman, managing director for Seven in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, claims that litigation is simply "part of the US way of doing business" and a clear sign of the huge opportunities available to whoever manages to remain a technical leader in mobile email. Seven claims that while NTP's legal action against RIM has not been good for the sector as a whole, it has helped steer more customer's Seven's way.
"It's not good for the market, but for us it has been fantastic. We have seen a five-fold increase in enquiries from enterprises and other smaller and mid-sized businesses," says Kate O'Sullivan, Seven's vice-president of corporate marketing.
Seven has taken a slightly different approach to RIM'S distinctive but quirky proprietary hardware, and has adopted what it claims is a "device-agnostic approach" to providing mobile email. The company claims that users can access its technology on over 100 mobile devices, making it significantly cheaper to set up and run than the BlackBerry-based alternative. Hedman claims that his firm is now second after RIM in terms of number of licences sold and now has over 80 partners in 47 countries.
Although Seven is relatively small compared to Microsoft, Nokia and even RIM, Hedman is confident that his company can hold its own. He was dismissive of the latest announcements from the larger vendors ranged against him, claiming that while Microsoft may have massive resources it is limited to supporting those organisations that run on its Exchange back-end, and pointed to the huge number of users of rival email system Lotus Notes in countries such as Japan.
With regards to Nokia and its acquisition of Seven's rival Intellisync, Hedman claimed that Nokia's combined hardware and software package would not pose too much of a problem to his business as ultimately the large operators have the most say over what software is integrated into handsets.
Give the intense competition in this area, the prognosis for any enterprise or smaller business that hasn't committed to one vendor for mobile email is to await developments. Further consolidation is extremely likely and lock-in should be avoided at all costs.
One option for smaller players may be an entirely hosted system, available from some service providers, which will help to insulate against some of the upheaval that this growing arena will continue to experience for some time yet.
