Nokia pushes e-mail and raises guidance

Nokia today unveiled its new Java-based e-mail platform, its answer to the growing demand for integrated business e-mail solutions. The Finnish vendor accented the announcement with an improved outlook for third quarter earnings and handset sales after drawing the financial community’s ire with earlier guidance warning of falling profits.

Nokia said today it was launching a suite of enterprise applications under the banner Nokia Business suite, starting with what it expects to be the core mobile application, e-mail. The two grades of software client is designed to be loaded into any Java-based phone certified by Nokia’s software program, linking back to Nokia’s e-mail server, which in turn can integrate with a company’s Microsoft Exchange Server.

Nokia is positioning the product as a network agnostic solution, its aim to sell e-mail servers not handsets. Nokia is licensing the basic e-mail interface for free to any carrier buying its server platform, but it plans to charge for the more feature-rich professional client. So far, however, Nokia has only certified six of its own smartphones and handsets for the client, but Nokia officials said they will begin certifying other vendors handsets soon.

The inklings of the product launch were first seen last March when Symbian and Nokia struck a deal with Microsoft to license its Exchange technology allowing the companies to create a direct link between their messaging platforms and the e-mail server most used by most enterprises. Without the integration agreement, Nokia would have been forced to couple its platform with an e-mail gateway, adding cost to the solution and complicating the service’s implimentation. Nokia said today it has a similar agreement with IBM for Lotus Notes and Domino and plans to add support for those platforms soon. The products will go on sale in Europe and the Americas in fourth quarter.

On the financial side, Nokia said it expects to post revenues of Euro 8.4 billion to Euro 8.5 billion, compared to the Euro 7.9 billion to Euro 8.2 billion projections it gave at its earnings call in July. Nokia officials said the change of tune is owed to stronger handset shipments than expected in the fourth quarter. That in turn would lead to profits of Euro 0.18 to Euro 0.19 per share compared of to Euro 0.14 to 0.17 projections it made this summer.