Addition of OMA EMN support on Mobile Gateway opens up major opportunity for operators to deliver push email to the consumer market
(1888PressRelease) June 07, 2007 - Synchronica plc, international provider of mobile synchronization and device management solutions, announced today that its award-winning Mobile Gateway 3.0 now also supports push email using the Open Mobile Alliance Electronic Mail Notification (OMA EMN) standard. This will encourage more operators to make mobile push email available to the consumer market by enabling more economical delivery of industry standard mobile email to the estimated 1.3 billion IMAP-compatible phones already owned by consumers.
The LEMONADE* standard was established by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to improve the user experience and usability of email on mobile devices. The LEMONADE group promotes open standards such as IMAP Idle and OMA EMN, which are platform independent and therefore designed to support email on the widest range of mobile devices.
For ISPs and ASPs, the LEMONADE IMAP Idle standard is rapidly emerging as the preferred mechanism for delivering push email to standard mobile phones because it works independently of the operator.
From an operator perspective, OMA EMN is more attractive than IMAP Idle, because a mobile phone using OMA EMN does not require a constant connection to the server and so demands less resources on the mobile network infrastructure and has less impact on the battery life. Instead OMA EMN uses SMS messaging to alert the mobile device that new mail has arrived.
From a user perspective, by adding support for the OMA EMN standard, Synchronica has created a major opportunity for operators to offer mobile push email to the mass market, because consumers can use the service on standard mobile phones, right out of the box.
According to mobile industry analyst firm Visiongain, the market for consumer mobile email is set to grow dramatically from 8 million in 2007 to 36 million in 2008 and 184 million consumer mobile email accounts anticipated by 2011. Synchronica's support for both OMA EMN and IMAP Idle enables the vendor to address both sides of the mobile email delivery market. Synchronica believes this growth is likely to be seen first in the emerging and rapidly adopting markets of Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, where PC penetration is low and traditional telecommunications infrastructure is limited, but mobile phones are seeing high growth rates. Synchronica predicts that in these markets, the mobile phone could become the primary form of accessing email, opening an attractive data revenue potential for operators in these regions.
"Our unique zero footprint architecture and commitment to open industry standards is key to successfully targeting the consumer market, particularly in emerging markets, with mobile push email," said Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica. "Most mobile email solutions today are based on proprietary protocols, requiring users to download additional client software. This approach is set to fail in the consumer market, where the overwhelming majority are using feature phones that cannot use proprietary clients. Approaches using a Java ME client theoretically work on feature phones, but provide an inferior user experience compared to built-in clients and are therefore less likely to be adopted," he said.
Mobile Gateway 3.0 provides carrier-grade scalability with load balancing and failover and runs on any J2EE application server using Solaris, Linux, or Windows servers. It supports IMAP / SMTP for email and includes support for both IMAP Idle and OMA EMN industry standards for push email. In addition, it includes support for SyncML (OMA DS) for synchronization of calendar, contacts, notes, and tasks. For service activation, it features a provisioning module (OMA CP), enabling over-the-air configuration of the built-in IMAP / SMTP and SyncML clients.
The combination of IMAP / SMTP and SyncML standards allows Synchronica to deliver push email and calendar / contact synchronization to mass market feature phones, representing more than 80 per cent of devices in use today, as well as high-end smartphones in use in the business market. All these services can be delivered without requiring any additional client to be installed on the device. Synchronica's Mobile Gateway 3.0 also includes back-end support for popular email services such as Gmail or AOL, as well as enterprise systems such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino.
* The License to Enhanced Mobile Oriented and Diverse Endpoints (LEMONADE) working group was set up by the IETF to address the efficiency of email services for bandwidth-limited and storage-restricted devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs. LEMONADE's mobile email standards are designed to extend existing IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) standards.
About Synchronica
Synchronica plc develops and markets synchronization and device management solutions for mobile operators, device manufacturers and enterprises. Its product portfolio ranges from data synchronization (OMA DS / LEMONADE) to device management (OMA DM) and firmware update over the air (FOTA). The company has deployed the world's first live installation of a device management suite in a carrier-grade environment. Products include the mobile device management suite Mobile Manager and the push email and synchronization solution Mobile Gateway. Headquartered in the UK with a development center in Berlin, Synchronica plc is a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange (SYNC.LN).
Addition of OMA EMN support on Mobile Gateway opens up major opportunity for operators to deliver push email to the consumer market 
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