Mobile Push Email - A Growing Business

The MobileMonday of February packed "Le Biciclette" with ICT professionals and business people: Many came to meet friends, make new contacts and listen to the discussion.

Once again, the speakers were superb and, with Marco Zamperini's lead, the audience got a comprehensive update and overview about the Mobile Push Email business.

Research In Motion's (RIM) Carrier Relationship Manager Alberto Bevilacqua told about the wide-spread BlackBerry service. This Canadian company was established in 1984 and became soon a pioneer in push email. RIM has taken the global wireless email market with a storm, and the growth is expected to keep its fast pace: In Gartner's estimates, the year 2007 may result to 9 million BlackBerry users. Bevilacqua explained the architecture of BlackBerry and emphasized the significance of security. Reflecting to the needs of businesses, Bevilacqua stated that BlackBerry is useful in all phases of a company value chain and that the limited total cost of ownership (TCO) and user-friendly interface are examples of strengths that are convincing enterprise customers.

Marco Zamperini - Alessia Bulani - Alberto Bevilacqua - Fabio Falzea

Fabio Falzea, Director Business Group Mobility and Embedded from Microsoft, explained the Microsoft mission to offer users access to information anytime, at any place, and with any device. He discussed Microsoft's wide mobile infrastructure of services, and how the mobile push email is just one of the many SW applications of the platform. The Microsoft offering combines mobile push email to, for example, instant messaging, audio/video and application sharing, thus enabling wide-range mobile multimedia communications. Falzea added that mobile push email is distributed as a free downloadable service pack for the Microsoft Exchange license owners.

Nuccio Sidoti, Country Manager from Seven, told that this U.S. originated group got increased momentum by acquiring the originally Finnish Smartner in 2004, and now the Seven group has companies in 11 offices in Europe and Asia-Pacific regions. Seven offers mobile push email supporting the major enterprise and consumer email systems and devices. The offering consists, like that of the competitors, also of calendar, corporate directories, personal contacts and documents, all used from mobile phones. The easy and fast implementation and configuration are important features of the offering, as well as the fact that all activities such as writing or composing a message are reflected simultaneously in the user's account. Ultimately, the strength of Seven's offering is that it functions horizontally in all devices which support Java.

Marta Naletto - Massimo Cortili

Funambol's VP Sales EMEA, Massimo Cortili, told about their open source mobile email solution based on SyncML which, thanks to its charater, is tested by the community that makes it "the largest QA team on the planet". The goal is to mobilize the entire open source ecosystem. SyncML is already embedded in a large number of mobile devices and is available as downloadable application for any Java-compatible gadget. Cortili declared that mail on the mobile phone is gradually becoming a commodity, and the SyncML enabled devices have increased notably during 2003-2005, when as the Smartphone quota has grown more slowly: This creates market opportunities for the fast-growing bulk of SyncML-enabled mobile devices.

Davide Caramico, Business Development Manager from Weathernews International (WNI), explained that the company works with the biggest mobile operators around the world. He told us about the successful case history about distributing content via mobile push email. The WNI's mobile-compliant push email has been offered especially in Japan, Australia and US, and there are over 1.6 million users world-wide. Most of them receive their weather email every morning. Occasionally, Japan's rough natural phenomena have raised the number of WNI i-Mode customer accesses over a million in a day.

Alberto Bevilacqua - Davide Caramico - Marco Zamperini

Stefano Diomedi - Gianmauro Calafiore - Emanuele Preda

The Photo Gallery and Presentations from Mobile Push Email event are online!

The next MobileMonday shall discuss about Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (alias Wireless MAN) focusing on WiMAX, WiBro and Wi-Fi Mesh networks in Rome on the 6th March. Registration for the event is already open - just sign in at the margin on the right. More info about the event will be posted on this site soon - stay tuned!