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Sify to roll out mail2mobile service

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CIOL Bureau
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BENGALURU, INDIA: Sify has launched mail2mobile service, through which mobile users can receive their non-POP3 mails on their handsets as well. Currently, this facility is offered by a few service providers like Airtel on the Blackberry handset alone, for which Airtel charges around Rs 800 a month.

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“Here the same services can be availed at Rs 130 a month and customers can access this service on any handset. In case a customer’s handset does not support an e-mail client, then he can get all new e-mails on his official account as an SMS,” informed Anil Pant, VP—Channel Sales, Enterprise Solutions, Sify Technologies. This service however has not been extended as a sales proposition to the company’s IT channel as yet.

Sify claims that the service can be used on any IMAP protocol and will work on any handset device in the market. It will shortly have a global launch for mail2mobile, which will support 1.5 billion devices all over the world, across GSM and CMDA networks.

An end-user can avail this service by paying Rs 700 as a one-time activation charge and then choosing from different tiers of payment. Customers, who avail the service for up to 500 users, can pay Rs 130 per subscriber, while those who opt for more between 501 to 1000 end point connections can pay Rs 120 monthly. There is also a free service (four months duration and more) on buying one of these packs.

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“All we need to activate this service is customer's mobile number, which will receive this service. Then our server will be configured with their mail server, which will be bound with that of the service provider with security protocols built in, so that the receiver can read and send e-mails securely,” Pant added.

Sify will start educating end-users about the other benefits of this service, besides constant access to their official mails. For one, they do not have to invest into any high-end device, nor will they have to download any application to the handset compromising on its performance.

“We are currently looking at enterprise clients. They want their employees to be able to access their official e-mails without investing into any new handset devices or opting for expensive service packages, which might also entail shifting their service provider as well,” said Pant. “This is why we have ensured that these customers can keep adding subscribers on the fly by simply buying more packs,” he added.

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As of now, mail2mobile will be just a service. But when Sify takes the retail way, it will launch something similar to a prepaid card or in some shrink-wrapped pack that can be sold by its IT channel and retailers as well as service providers. Right now, the company is addressing the enterprise customers through its direct sales team, and will soon address the SMB market and retail customers through IT channel partners and retailers. The Internet service providers (ISPs) will be added later to address the mass market, as they can offer mail2mobile as a value-added service to their subscriber.

mail2mobile works on e-mail configurations built on various platforms including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes. It also supports POP3 e-mail clients like AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

“There is no other device or service in the market, except Blackberry, which offers this service. This means we have a lot of scope for adoption in India, which has an increasingly mobile workforce. Our service is also operator-independent, which means that subscribers need not change their service provider,” informed Pant.

Sify informed that mail2mobile is optimized to host over 15,000 users on a single server. “We hope this service to be a key revenue area for Sify in the next two years, since we are targeting almost 2.5 crore customers. If you just calculate the revenue that we would generate by the activation fee from these customers, you can judge why we are so excited about mail2mobile,” enthused Pant.

After e-mail, Sify also hopes to add other business applications like business intelligence as an add-on to this service in the future. The company is currently gearing up its service team to offer 24x7 support to customers for mail2mobile, before it is ready to go en masse through IT channel partners. It is already in talks with two national distributors and will freeze on the names shortly.

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