Nokia pushes harder for enterprise mobility

Nokia's recently announced plan to buy Intellisync, a wireless e-mail vendor, for $430 million will give the cell phone giant key software for crafting mobile data applications for business.

Intellisync will be folded into Nokia's Enterprise Solutions group, headed by former HP executive Mary McDowell. The group, formed in January 2004, is intended to be a key source of growth and revenue for Nokia, as it competes with Good Technology, Research in Motion, Visto and, increasingly, Microsoft, to address needs of customers looking to extend back-end applications and data to mobile devices.

But Nokia has a way to go, says Teney Takahashi, market analyst with the Radicati Group. Enterprise solutions accounted for 3% of Nokia's 2004 revenue, he says. While the group's revenue jumped 57% in 2004 compared with general enterprise revenue in 2003, the group's yearly net loss also increased, by 41%.

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Nokia's recently announced plan to buy Intellisync, a wireless e-mail vendor, for $430 million will give the cell phone giant key software for crafting mobile data applications for business.

Intellisync will be folded into Nokia's Enterprise Solutions group, headed by former HP executive Mary McDowell. The group, formed in January 2004, is intended to be a key source of growth and revenue for Nokia, as it competes with Good Technology, Research in Motion, Visto and, increasingly, Microsoft, to address needs of customers looking to extend back-end applications and data to mobile devices.

But Nokia has a way to go, says Teney Takahashi, market analyst with the Radicati Group. Enterprise solutions accounted for 3% of Nokia's 2004 revenue, he says. While the group's revenue jumped 57% in 2004 compared with general enterprise revenue in 2003, the group's yearly net loss also increased, by 41%.

Recently, the group launched the Nokia Business Center, a push-based e-mail service similar to RIM's BlackBerry offering. But initially, this center supports only data-enabled cell phones and other devices using the Symbian operating system.

"Intellisync will strengthen Nokia's position in the [enterprise] wireless e-mail market and provide Nokia with a solid wireless e-mail platform for [rebranded by] carriers," Takahashi says.

Radicati projects healthy growth for corporate e-mail in general and wireless e-mail in particular (see graphic, right).

But wireless e-mail is only one part of the enterprise picture.

"What [Nokia] really wanted was the application-integration [capabilities] from Intellisync," says Jack Gold, principal with J. Gold Associates. "Wireless e-mail will become a commodity. The data that enterprises are really willing to pay for [to access wirelessly] is the data from their SAP, Oracle and other applications."

Intellisync's flagship product is its Mobile Suite. A server-based gateway behind the corporate firewall links corporate e-mail servers, such as Exchange and Domino, with a wide range of mobile devices and operating systems. Two other parts of the suite handle device management and provisioning, as well as data and file synchronization.

"In wireless e-mail, most of our deployments are smaller" in size, says Rip Gerber, chief marketing officer for Intellisync. "But we have thousands of seats, sometimes tens of thousands, for our device-management software and our data- and file-synchronization software."

Rivals downplay the merger. "Intellisync focuses on consumer, 'prosumer' and the small-business market," says Terry Austin, president of Good Technology. Good has been working with Nokia for months on joint engineering and support for the upcoming Nokia Eseries handhelds, which are aimed at business users. "Intellisync doesn't run a network operations center [as Good does], and as such doesn't offer the same level of guaranteed service and IT management features that the high-end enterprise segment demands."

Gerber says Intellisync offers a hosted e-mail service, targeted at small businesses. For large enterprises, it has software based on 126 issued and pending patents that deal with security, device management and the various complexities associated with extending enterprise application data to wireless devices.