The privately-held company, based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, calls its product Consilient Push and says it can push email to phones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Sanyo and Samsung.
To do so, it deploys a server in a mobile operator’s network, communicating with a software client on the handsets that complies with the emerging Push-IMAP (P-IMAP) standard. It licenses the server to carriers on a per-user basis, with the Java clients freely available for downloading from its website.
CEO Trevor Adey said the company expects carriers to announce handsets preloaded with the client in the near future. Adey said Consilient started life as a partner of fellow Canadian developer Research In Motion Ltd (RIM).
For a long time we connected their BlackBerry devices to all the email servers they didn’t support natively, such as GroupWise, Sun, Sendmail, Oracle and Mirapoint, and apart from GroupWise, for which they’ve just released native support, it’s still our technology enabling the connection to all the others, he said.
However, two years ago the company was contracted by one of the largest software companies in the world to develop technology that would enable its email server to bypass the BlackBerry NOC and BES, and Consilient Push is the result.
Adey said the company sees its largest market as in the carriers, enabling them to push email to feature phones, with the largest take-up expected in Europe and Asia.
Wherever SMS has really taken off [i.e. not North America], consumers want to send messages phone-to-email or phone-to-desktop, he said.
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That said, there is no technological reason why the system cannot be sold directly to enterprises, who can then host the Consilient Push Server themselves and deploy the clients to mobile devices, including BlackBerry handsets, for connection to POP and IMAP email servers.
The P-IMAP standard has a number of heavyweights behind it including Oracle, Sony Ericsson, LG, China Mobile, Motorola and Sun, but for now, Consilient is the only company working with the draft standard to produce a platform providing a better approach to push email for both operators and corporate customers, Adey said.
