SAN FRANCISCO: Nokia, the world's largest maker of mobile phones, said it was launching a corporate e-mail system that would enable workers at almost any level to send and receive mail from their mobile phones.
Nokia Business Center, as the new e-mail system is to be known, seeks to bridge the gap between the world's 650 million corporate e-mail accounts and the elite of only 10 million or so who have mobile access to their business e-mail inboxes.
"We are trying to bring e-mail to the masses by taking it out of the realm of just CEOs and the highly paid sales force," said Dave Grannan, head of Nokia's e-mail business.
Seeking to build on the success of the popular Blackberry line of e-mail pagers and phones from Research in Motion (RIM), Nokia said it was looking to make e-mail more cost-effective and available on a wider range of phones.
Nokia is joining the industry-wide pile-on in which everyone from software giant Microsoft Corp. to e-mail management firms Visto, Seven, Good Technology, and Intellisync Corp. are jumping into a market pioneered by RIM.
Nokia's e-mail system comes in two distinct modes. The standard version gives office workers basic read/write access to e-mail.
A professional version integrates directly into a company corporate network directory, giving people direct access to their e-mail on their mobile device in the same way they would expect to use it on their office computers. It also allows the mobile worker to handle hefty e-mail attachments.
There are two barriers to making corporate e-mail available to a wider audience of office workers, one technical and one economic, said Mary McDowell, general manager of Nokia's enterprise solutions business unit.
The technical problem is solved by taking advantage of the widely used Java standard which applies to most smartphones. The economics of the e-mail system is based on giving away mass-market access to the system at little cost.
The standard version comes free when a company purchases a server license, Grannan said. Each server license covers 400 people and is priced at 1,800 euros ($2,218).
The professional version requires a company to pay an additional one-time fee, per user, of 55 euros, giving them a perpetual license for each office worker. The cost per user for Blackberry licenses ranges from two to four times as much.
Thirteen Nokia mobile devices will be certified to work on the system by the end of the year. But the e-mail system would fall flat if it only worked on Nokia devices.
Grannan said Nokia's plan is to certify rival handsets to work with its e-mail system. In principle, any smartphone that runs Java technology can qualify. Each device takes two to three weeks to be certified.
He said Nokia would focus on certifying other high-volume Java mobile phones first, including models from Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
"Our intent is still to support RIM on our devices," Gramman said. "Our premise is we want to have as many of the leading e-mail devices on our system," he said.
The e-mail system will become commercially available during the fourth quarter in the United States and Europe, resulting in some initial revenue. Additional regions will follow next year. "The big revenue ramp comes in 2006," he said.
The executives cited forecasts from market researcher Gartner Inc. that between 97 million and 190 million mobile phone users will ultimately have access to e-mail.