The deal, which was announced at the Nokia World event held yesterday and today in Amsterdam, sees the Finnish handset and network equipment vendor acquiring the Palo Alto, California-based provider of the Access ‘n Share service, which Avvenu said provides remote access and private sharing of all the stuff [people] keep on their computers, including work documents, photos, and files.
It is akin to the popular GoToMyPC offering from Citrix, or its direct competitor PCNow from WebEx (now Cisco). The major difference is that in a premium version of the service, it does not rely on the host computer from which the data is to be pulled being left on.
Avvenu’s web site is clearly written for Mr Joe Public rather than the corporate reader. Its description of its vanilla service is Login at share.avvenu.com on your internet-connected mobile phone, smart phone, PC, or Mac, and in a matter of moments, you can get that file you forgot, start listening to your music, or check out the photos your friend just sent you.
There is a premium feature, an optional, separately charged extra called Anytime Files, which Avvenu said allows you to remotely access your stuff even if your computer is turned off or otherwise not online. You choose the documents, folders, or photos that you want to remotely access, and Avvenu takes care of the rest. Your files are copied to a secure online personal digital locker for anytime access and are automatically updated when you make changes to them on your computer. The basic Access ‘n Share service is free, while the Anytime Files feature costs $3.99.
The consumer focus of Avvenu is further underlined by its recent announcements prior to acquisition. In October it announced the availability of Access ‘n Share on the iPhone, whose users can now remotely access and share photos and Office documents with it. In July it unveiled Avvenu Music for Facebook, describing its as a social music service designed for the 30 million users of the popular social networking site.
There have also been moves on the business user front. In June there was an announcement with handset vendor Palm where Access ‘n Share was made available on Palm’s Foleo mobile companion product, whose users can now have untethered and over the air remote access to products on work and home PCs.
Our View
So what does Nokia have planned with the Avvenu service? Obviously it wants to provide content services to the mass of consumers using its phones and the WiFi-only devices it currently targets at gamesters.
That the deal was announced by Mary McDowell, executive VP and general manager of Nokia Enterprise Solutions suggests that it plans to compete with GoToMyPC and PCNow for the corporate user business, and it would not surprise us if those vendors didn’t move to offer storage of documents in the cloud as a premium add-on to their remote access services. It will be interesting to see whether, if they go down that road, they also start to offer their vanilla services for free.
Beyond that there is the looming threat of GDrive, the online storage offering long hinted at by Google. The search engine heavyweight certainly has the storage capacity to do it, with all those massive data centers it has put into Washington state and other parts of the world, and as for low-hanging fruits to target, there are all those Gmail users.
