Seven wins KDDI

Seven, the mobile access software architecture developer, has landed KDDI of Japan as its latest carrier contract, making the vendor’s System Seven platform the dominant mobile enterprise software in the highly progressive Japanese market.

Earlier this past summer, Seven announced a deployment at NTT DoCoMo, and the two contracts together have Seven reaching 70% of the market in Japan.

"We looked at the data applications market in Japan as something that went beyond the mobile professional," said Bill Nguyen, founder and president of Seven. "About 70-80% of the mobile users in Japan are data users."

The KDDI deployment was carried out with the help of NEC, Seven’s primary systems integration partner. Seven’s software is sometimes embedded in devices in such deployments, but for KDDI the company embedded System Seven into the network operator’s BREW-based application layer.

The ability to work with the Qualcomm’s increasingly popular BREW offering should further broaden Seven’s appeal in the U.S. market, where it has already won business from Sprint PCS and Cingular Wireless. Verizon Wireless and U.S. Cellular are among the other carriers that use BREW.

Nguyen said Seven has not yet announced a formal partnership with Qualcomm. However, if the company follows the model set by other BREW-affiliated developers, such an announcement should be coming soon.

System Seven allows access to corporate e-mail, calendar, and personal and corporate contacts via most mobile devices or Web browsers -- eliminating the need to use multiple device types for corporate voice and data services, and the need to switch device types just to support new corporate IT software.

Seven’s architecture also works with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, IMAP and POP e-mail, calendar, personal and corporate contacts, tasks and documents.