This is an area of keen interest from ISVs, handset manufacturers and mobile operators, with Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM) as the poster child. RIM has five million subscribers in enterprises around the world, served with email from the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and the network operating centers RIM operates on behalf of the mobile operators that sell the BlackBerry service.
Its success has attracted competition, some with RIM-like business models, Good Technology being a case in point. Others court the favors of the mobile operators by offering to white label their push technology, with Visto and Seven being the prime exponents of such a strategy. Microsoft has also push-enabled its Exchange email server and wants a piece of the action in this growing market.
Ra’anana-based Emblaze, therefore, needs first to attract attention in this busy space, and to this end it is making its debut with a freely downloadable software client for its Emoze technology. Installed on a desktop computer and associated with the user’s mobile device (a phone or a connected PDA), it will forward emails, provided the desktop machine is left on.
This, explained Doron Cohen, VP of marketing and business development at Emblaze, is the Emoze Personal Edition, designed specifically to take push email to the masses and raise his company’s profile in a space where it has not previously been present: Emblaze is in fact a group of companies with operations in handset design (Emblaze Mobile), wireless conferencing (Emblaze VCON) and IPTV middleware and video-on-demand services (Orca Interactive).
Later this year, the company will launch revenue generating versions of the technology, assuming Personal Edition has enjoyed market acceptance.
One of the reasons the BlackBerry service is so popular with enterprise users, of course, is its security. Mr Cohen argued, however, that because its store-and-forward architecture relies on there being a NOC somewhere in the process, there is scope for a security breach. In contrast, he explained, Emblaze’s offering simply forwards the message, with no storage occurring anywhere in the process.
Will Emoze take the world by storm? That remains to be seen. As a carrier-independent technology, Emblaze initially expects to rely on value-added resellers in each country it works in to promote the technology, although the company is not ruling out alliances with mobile operators.
The trick then will be to persuade operators in markets where push email has yet to take off, such as China and India, that while they won’t be able to sell BlackBerry-like subscriptions or sell high-end, proprietary devices like the BlackBerry handsets, they will be able to sell more data subscriptions on the back of Emoze, and thus also should drive up their data traffic as more people start receiving emails using the technology.
