Mobile communications company Nokia will significantly boost its wireless email credentials in its efforts to push mobile email into the mainstream with the announcement it will acquire middleware vendor Intellisync.

The US$430 transaction will allow Nokia to deliver what it describes as the industry’s most complete offering for the development, deployment and management of mobility in the enterprise.

“Enterprises face increasing challenges when it comes to selecting devices, enabling access to email and securing corporate data, while carriers are facing more and more complexity to support these demands. We want to make it simple for our business customers to mobilise their workforces no matter what their starting point,” said Mary McDowell, executive vice president and general manager, Nokia’s Enterprise Solutions business group. “Based on our customers needs, we identified the acquisition of Intellisync as the best way to procure solutions to these challenges. The combination of our portfolios and the addition of the Intellisync team will make Nokia the core mobility provider for business of all sizes.”

Though Nokia already has its own push email solution, Nokia Business Centre, which is part of its Business division, the system currently only supports 60 Series phones from Nokia and the addition of Intellisync’s platform-independent carrier-grade and enterprise focused solutions which connect to virtually any device.

However, Nokia also announced support for Blackberry Connect on its 9300 smartphone and 9500 Communicator in August this year for the Australian market. Blackberry Connect currently dominates the push email sector laying claim to some 3.5 million email services globally. The market potential is significant with more than 680 million mobile devices already shipped worldwide, only about 6 million of them are using mobile email to date.

However, with Research in Motion firmly entrenched in the US and Microsoft keenly focused on the same market potential, plus a handful of third part solutions for in-house enterprise platforms GoodLink, Seven Mobile and Visto Mobile there’s plenty of competition.

While Nokia Enterprise Solutions, VP David Petts, admits that while software is an important revenue stream the company’s main game is to promote mobile handheld solutions in order to boost handset sales, the market for mobile middleware is set to boom with IDC predicting the market has already reached half a billion US dollars, and is now predicting this could triple over the next four or five years.
IDC Australia analyst Warren Chaisatien says roughly one third of Australian businesses have adopted wireless solutions, mostly for email and personal information management, but he predicts that there is more to come.

Chaisatien believes the market will soon move to putting more complex applications on mobile devices with CRM and sales force automation two obvious front runners. Finally in a third phase, Chaisatien sees mobile commerce taking off in the same way e-commerce has developed on the wired Web.

This point is not missed by phone giant. Petts said the recently released push email system is “a platform approach” and sees the solution developing over the next two to three years to become a SIP server and Application platform for converged collaborative services.

Getting mindshare in the IT reseller space in imperative if Nokia is to become a player in this market and the Intellisync brand, intellectual property and staff will deliver immediate street cred. However, Petts says, the company already has plenty of runs on the channel board.

“We do have access to the IT channel,” said Petts pointing to the company’s firewall business and growing relationships with the likes of Cisco and Avaya in the VoIP space.

Petts said Nokia intends to “leverage that security footprint to the extent that it can recruit more it resellers” to the fold. To that end, Nokia has already signed Brightpoint as a local distributor with integrators CSC and Alphawest both keen to get selling push email solutions.