As RIM's "push" is threatened, Phonified offers "pull"

With RIM's BlackBerry service under threat of a blackout as soon as tomorrow, it's no news that the vendor's competitors are jumping in to scavenge its lucrative customer base. But RIM's push e-mail competitors may themselves have competition for those lucrative enterprise accounts.

Start-up firm Phonified is challenging the established notion of enterprise e-mail with its own entirely software-based solution--one that requires no enterprise service, no network operations center and, most significantly, no monthly service charge. Phonified is trying to rekindle interest in 'pull' e-mail, a capability that is available on almost any phone with a WAP browser, but has been shunned by business for its lack of security and measly feature set. Phonified CEO James Storey, however, said that if security and functionality can be instilled in pull-based e-mail, it could be the perfect solution for enterprises that want to extend wireless e-mail to a majority of their employees without incurring massive service charges.

Phonified has been developing a software that interfaces with all generations of Microsoft's Exchange server as well as a phone client that can scale far down into the mid-tier phone range--products it plans to launch next week. Instead of a capex-heavy server-based technology, however, Phonified's software acts much like typical Webmail solutions corporate employees use to access their e-mail from PCs outside the office. It uses Web-scrapping technologies to access information from an employee's mailbox on the Exchange server and establishes a hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) with the employee's phone. There, a native application running on a later-generation Java platform or smartphone operating system uploads that information into an on-board e-mail client, where the employee can interact with the messages much as he or she would with a push e-mail solution.

"As far as the enterprise server is concerned, we're a Web page that accesses a mailbox," Storey said.

Of course, the service has its limitations. In the pull-based model, a user has to actively synchronize between the server and his phone, akin to the hitting the "get mail" button on a Web-based e-mail client. That fact makes many people cringe, since push was the innovation that popularized e-mail on the wireless deck in the first place, despite browser-based e-mail's availability on the wireless network years before the first BlackBerry hit the market. Storey admitted that a pull-based solution isn't for everyone, but he said it definitely has its place in enterprises that want to extend wireless connectivity to a larger proportion of its workers or don't feel that real-time synchronization is a priority.

"There is a large number of people out there that would be interested in this," Storey said. "In fact, we don't think it would be a directly competing solution with RIM or Good [Technology], Visto or Seven. We think it can be very complimentary."

All of the above mentioned companies are software vendors (in RIM's case a handset vendor), but they are also transforming themselves into major service providers, charging steep access fees for the e-mail connectivity they provide. They do, however, provide a very robust service, which a subset of enterprise users does require, Storey said. The industry, however, is expected to migrate 50% of the 600 million Exchange e-mail boxes in the world to a wireless platform, and it's extremely unrealistic that enterprises would pay $40 a month to connect 300 million workers to push e-mail, Storey said.

Phonified solution has a one-time fee for a software license for each mailbox and each phone with no recurring monthly charge. It's a relatively cheap way for enterprises to give the larger proportion of their employees access to e-mail, Storey said, while reserving push e-mail solutions for the upper executive ranks