Wireless e-mail has become so critical to the District of Columbia that its IT group is crafting its own failover system to make sure messages can get through in an emergency.

"When you're talking about 1,300 users, many of them top managers and first responders, the wireless e-mail system has to perform," says Rob Mancini, program manager, citywide messaging for the government of the District of Columbia. "We're very focused on emergency services."

The district's corporate e-mail server is Microsoft Exchange. But to keep front-line users up-to-the-second, it relies on Good Technology's software and service to transmit Exchange e-mails to a range of handheld devices over a cellular network.

But neither Good Technology nor the district's previous vendor, Research in Motion (RIM), has a built-in failover capability, Mancini says. The district plans to link the internal Good Technology servers on its storage-area network with servers elsewhere via NSI Software's Double-Take data replication-software. Double-Take will continuously copy the wireless e-mail traffic to the back-up servers. The failover capability is scheduled to be in place by September.

Such high-level data protection indicates the growth in numbers and importance of wireless e-mail in the enterprise. In an October 2005 report, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney estimates that by the end of 2006, the number of wireless business and consumer e-mail users will about double, to 16 million. By the end of 2008, Gartner estimates that half of all employees who access e-mail via a wired PC also will have access to wireless e-mail on some type of handheld device, probably a smart phone.

In response to this growth, vendors are recasting themselves through mergers and acquisitions, and through new product features. Behind-the-firewall vendors, which offer server-based software for the enterprise, include Good Technology, iAnywhere, Intellisync, Microsoft and RIM.

Several vendors, such as Seven Networks and Visto, offer similar products for carriers, which install the software and sell wireless e-mail services to businesses and consumers.

One of the most important of these developments was Microsoft's release last October of Service Pack 2 for Exchange Server 2003. This software for the first time lets Exchange directly deliver e-mail to and from Windows-based mobile devices without the need for extra middleware or third-party licenses on top of Exchange, as required by such vendors as RIM.

But the new service pack requires that handheld devices run Microsoft's Messaging & Security Feature Pack, which runs only on Windows Mobile 5.0, released in November. The first of these handhelds are now coming to market, but many of them are expected.

"Microsoft has taken synchronization and push e-mail and built them into Exchange and [Windows-based] devices: it's become a commodity," says David Via, an analyst with Ferris Research.

Industry consolidation

Last October, Sybase's iAnywhere division acquired Extended Systems, which offers the OneBridge software for wireless e-mail and other messaging functions (iAnywhere had been reselling Intellisync's Mobile Suite for wireless e-mail and hasn't clarified its plans about these two offerings). A month later, Nokia said it would acquire Intellisync, in an effort to give Nokia handhelds new messaging, management and security features.

Earlier in 2005, Good Technology bought JPMobile for its wireless support for Lotus Notes Domino and GroupWise and for its ability to tie them into its GoodLink wireless e-mail server.

The consolidations are part of a related trend by the surviving vendors - a race to support more devices, more networks, more corporate e-mail systems and more kinds of communications, such as instant messaging and telephone voice mail.

Good Technology, for example, announced in August a project with Cisco and Avaya that would let the GoodLink server through Microsoft Exchange collect voice mails left on a user's VoIP desk phone, and then wirelessly send them as a .WAV file attachment to a standard e-mail. With a client voice mail player from a company such as MotionApps, mobile users can play the message on a Windows Mobile or PalmOS handheld.