Oz lands Nokia IM deal

IM software developer Oz today announced a major extension of its licensing deal with Nokia with the vendor agreeing to incorporate Oz’s IM client across its portfolio of handsets.

The deal expands upon Nokia’s two-year relationship with Oz, which saw Oz’s software shipped with two Nokia handsets, the higher end 6800 and mid-range 3595. With the licensing agreement in place now, Nokia is free to incorporate Oz’s messaging client in all of its phones. Though he would not say if Nokia planned to ship the software with every single handset, Oz CEO Skuli Mogensen said the client would become a fairly standard feature in the vendor’s portfolio.

Earlier this month, Oz also announced a licensing deal with Samsung, which began shipping three GSM phones with Oz’s IM software. The Samsung and Nokia deals along with deals not yet announced give Oz a significant chunk of the U.S. mobile IM market, Mogensen said. In the first quarter, 1 million handsets shipped in the U.S. with the Oz client, but in Q4 that number will jump to 10 million based on the new licensing agreements, Mogensen said. By 2005, he added, Oz expects to have 75% of the U.S. mobile IM client market.

The Oz client incorporates all of the major messaging services--AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and ICQ--into a single application. Network gateways supplied by either Oz or Comverse connect users directly to the IM service portals, making a mobile phone a direct extension of the IM network, just like a PC. While vendors may be making the client software standard in their terminals, the onus is still on the carriers to strike agreements with the messaging providers to access their networks. Before this year, the messaging providers have been hesitant to pursue the mobile wing of IM because of the lack of a clear revenue model. But Oz’s solution allows carriers to bill for individual messages, allowing the carriers to set up clear revenue sharing models with the IM providers, Mogensen said. In addition, carriers do not have to worry about IM cannibalizing their SMS and MMS traffic since most mobile IM sessions are handset-to-PC not handset-to-handset, Mogensen said.

Most of the major North American carriers have announced messaging deals with one or more of the major IM portals. So far, Oz has publicly announced T-Mobile and Cingular as customers for its clients and gateways and has another unannounced Tier I customer set to launch service, Mogensen said.