Oz targets the consumer inbox

While the attention on mobile e-mail seems to be focused on the enterprise push e-mail market, Oz Communications is carving, unnoticed, a niche for itself in the consumer e-mail space.

Though it has only four announced carrier customers — Cingular, 3 Scandinavia, Telus and Virgin Mobile — Oz claims to have more than a million individual subscribers to the e-mail service it powers for AOL, MSN and Yahoo. More than likely, the dozen major global carriers that use its instant messaging solution are using Oz' e-mail product on the side. Aside from Oz, however, the consumer market and the billion or so Web e-mail accounts worldwide remain unaddressed, probably because the money in enterprise e-mail is simply too powerful a lure for e-mail applications developers. Thus, the Good Technologies, Research in Motions, Sevens and Vistos have made no effort to move their technologies across that mass-market line.

“Regular people don't want to use it,” said Beverly Wilks, director of corporate marketing and communications for Oz. People want to use their personal e-mail as a casual service, not as a lifeline to their work places, and the highly advanced push solutions are too expensive and too omnipresent for their tastes, Wilks said. Oz's pull solution uses an embedded client to retrieve e-mail on demand, augmented with a “message waiting” push notification service that operates through regular short message service. And instead of the $100 or more monthly data bills for a BlackBerry service, carriers are charging customers merely by the message or by the bit downloaded.

Of all the push e-mail solution providers, Visto would be the most likely candidate to compete against Oz for a place in the consumer handset. It has developed clients that can work on simple Java handsets, extending its reach well beyond other vendors, which either target smartphones or dedicated messaging devices. But although Visto definitely has ambitions beyond the enterprise set, it's willing to leave the consumers to companies such as Oz.

“Moving ahead, we don't want to restrict ourselves to be an ‘enterprise’ e-mail service,” said Sanjay Kamble, Visto vice president of marketing. “We believe there is a much broader base of ‘business’ e-mail users that we can reach. The enterprise is too limited.”

ONLINE

Don't forget to read Telephony's guide to carrier Ethernet, a new supplement we created to help you make sense of where this market is going. Along with that, we've also added an Ethernet One-Stop page to our Web site. Some of the highlights from the supplement include:

• A look at how Ethernet fits into Verizon's data services plan
• The variety of Ethernet-based services available
• How Ethernet-based backhaul is helping to address 3G capacity issues.

www.telephonyonline.com/ethernet