Orange Mail will be 'Powered by Intellisync' for France Telecom Group's subsidiary, Orange Netherlands and its 1.8 Million customers

Intellisync, a leader in platform-independent wireless messaging and mobile software, has today announced that it has been selected as the mobility platform of choice for Orange Netherlands, part of Orange group, one of the world's largest mobile communications companies and a subsidiary of the France Telecom group.

Orange Mail in the Netherlands, now 'powered by Intellisync,' makes it possible to automatically send and receive email from a smartphone or PDA without manual synchronization. Email attachments in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Acrobat Reader, can also be viewed, processed and forwarded directly to a smartphone. In addition, agenda, contacts, tasks and notes are 'synced' automatically and pushed to a user's wireless device.

Intellisync's Wireless Email platform allows Orange Mail users to enjoy a fully synchronized, real-time email, calendar and contacts experience on their mobile devices. The solution has the flexibility to enable carriers to provide automatic wireless email and PIM (Personal Information Management) synchronization solutions for both small and large organizations. Orange Mail's high level of end-to-end server to device security, provided by Intellisync, meets the strict security requirements for sensitive company data which are transferred during communication via mobile devices.

"The Intellisync carrier-grade wireless email platform continues to help carriers provide secure and simple-to-install-and-use wireless email to business users using virtually any enabled device on any operating system," said Korak Mitra, senior vice president of worldwide carrier operations at Intellisync. "We believe the flexibility, scalability, reliability and security provided by the Intellisync platform along with professional services and customer support, make us a very compelling choice for carriers all over the world. We intend to continue to focus on providing superior solutions that will help carriers drive activations and increase ARPU (average revenue per user)."

The Orange Mail service, powered by Intellisync, is said to be very simple to use. It can be downloaded from the Orange website, and works in combination with common email programs, such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Based on the need and size of an organization, customers of Orange Mail have the opportunity to choose from three options: receive wireless push email from a PC (one user); receive wireless push email from a computer with Orange Mail workgroup software (one to 20 users); and receive wireless push email from the Orange Mail server (20 to 5000+ users).

Office expands geographical reach into Spanish and Portuguese markets

cVidya Networks, a leading provider of next generation Revenue Assurance solutions, announced today that it has recently opened an office in Lisbon, Portugal, expanding it's geographical and international reach. The office will serve as the contact point for customers in Southern Europe and will cater to telecommunication providers in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries. The Lisbon office adds to cVidya's growing network of offices in Europe, APAC and Israel.

"The Lisbon office gives us better proximity to our customers in Southern Europe, allowing us to strengthen our existing relationships and build new ones," said Alon Aginsky, CEO of cVidya.
 
Filipe Monteiro will head up the Lisbon operations, having over twenty years of experience in business and sales development in the telecom market. Monteiro brings with him local and international expertise, including operations in South America. Most recently, Monteiro served as the Portuguese Country Manager for major OSS/BSS company, Convergys.
 

Streamezzo’s technology providing the interactivity consumers require for increased penetration of Mobile TV

Streamezzo and Cognacq-Jay Image (TDF Group) have today announced a partnership with the development of the first platform enabling operators, broadcasters and content providers to host and deploy Rich Media Mobile TV applications. With Streamezzo’s technology, Cognacq-Jay Image is said to offer a first set of applications giving Mobile TV users the interactivity they need.

“Cognacq-Jay Image is a reference in audio-video production, said Olivier Avaro, Vice President – Business Development for Streamezzo.  “This partnership represents a terrific acknowledgement of Streamezzo’s superior technology for providing interactive Mobile TV services in real time.  With Streamezzo, Cognacq-Jay Image can better fulfil its customers’ needs and provide an end-to-end solution. Operators, broadcasters and content providers can customize this solution to add the services that will give end-users the interactivity they require. With this platform, end-users will enjoy the ultimate TV viewing experience in any mobile situation.”
 
The integration of Streamezzo’s technology into Cognacq-Jay Image’s platform enables operators and broadcasters to integrate value-added services such as electronic program guides, catalogues, menus and text banners to their Mobile TV offers.
 
These services provide consumers with an added level of interactivity, enabling to adapt TV content to mobile-life usage and situations: for example, it enables users to browse the content they want to watch, switch easily and rapidly between channels and view a program while a text banner displays stock quotes simultaneously.  Interactivity represents the next necessary step to make Mobile TV compelling for consumers and to increase its penetration on the market.
 
“Cognacq-Jay Image has selected Streamezzo rich media technology for the development of a new concept of mobile applications on its live TV platform. This technology enables successful rollout of innovative and interactive services. Streamezzo technology is a key component of our VOD and live TV platform facilitating the development and provision of interactive services to the mobile and broadcast communities”, said Grégory Samson, Business Development for Cognacq-Jay Image.

Raritan, a leading provider of solutions for managing IT infrastructure, has today announced that Experian, the global information solutions company based in the U.K., will use Raritan’s remote management solutions to maintain servers in its new data center.

To accommodate growth, Experian launched an ambitious, multi-million-dollar development effort, whose centerpiece is a new data center to serve its extensive European operations. The 700-server data center, which is expected to grow to 5,000 servers, replaced two processing centers – one of which became Experian’s disaster recovery data center.
 
“Experian’s new data center was created to provide our clients with a safe, secure, highly resilient facility for delivering mission-critical services,” said Adrian Dyson, head of Experian’s Command Center and Automation, which includes the company’s Technology Services group.  “We were looking for a secure and flexible solution to help manage all of our IT equipment, which includes Windows and UNIX platforms.”
 
Experian chose to standardize on a combination of Raritan’s Dominion KX KVM-over-IP switches and Dominion SX serial-over-IP console solutions for managing their multi-platform servers, and Raritan’s CommandCenter Secure Gateway that provides centralized views of IT equipment in the main and back-up data centers.
 
“The new data center provides us with greatly improved capabilities to maintain and process client data, as well as providing growth capacity.  In addition, operational teams will offer 24/7 year-round support and improved service levels,” says Dyson.  “We needed a management solution that would help us increase the operational efficiency of the data center and improve uptime of its services.”

New VoxSurf messaging system enables fans to comment on England World Cup qualifiers

VoxSurf, the London-based video messaging solution provider, today announced that the BBC in the UK has deployed its technology to power a new trial called 'Your Shout!' The trial allows football fans to send in 3G video messages with their opinions on the crucial England internationals and during Football Focus broadcasts.

Simply by making a video call and following the on-screen instructions, football fans can leave their comments, with the best content broadcast on live TV during and after the matches, which are being covered live on Match of the Day. The best videos will also be shown on the BBC Sport website.

The trial is based on VoxSurf's VxOne video messaging technology, customised for the BBC. Once video messages are received they are immediately sent to the Match of the Day editorial team as emails. Additionally, the system retains the caller's number, enabling them to be contacted for further opinions or quotes.

It extends BBC Sport's current usage of video messaging capabilities, which is being used on Football Focus, the BBC's Saturday lunchtime football show. Video clips are submitted to Football Focus and then broadcast on the following week's show as well as the Football Focus website.

"The 'Your Shout!' trial is a world first - we haven't seen another method that applies video messaging to allow users to interact with and contribute to live TV broadcasting," commented Andy Munarriz, co-founder of VoxSurf. "It combines the immediacy of the phone with the excitement of video to allow anyone to create personalised content and become a football pundit. With 3G becoming mainstream we see major opportunities for leading broadcasters to get even closer to their viewers."

What’s the hype about? Only 1% of Europeans use VoIP frequently to make calls from home

According to industry hype, voice over IP (VoIP) pure plays like Skype and Vonage are on the verge of transforming and taking over the telecom industry. But Forrester Research believes that pure plays have no chance of dethroning proactive European incumbent telcos from their consumer fixed voice market leadership.

Forrester thinks that VoIP pure plays will fail to survive as independent companies because they don’t offer a truly disruptive and transformational service — and they lack key advantages that the incumbents have. Telcos like British Telecom and France Télécom can continue to dominate future voice markets as long as they maintain their proactive and innovative VoIP response strategies.
 
 “VoIP adoption will certainly help trigger sweeping changes in voice pricing models across the industry. However, that will most likely not lead to the major industry disruptions foreseen by VoIP pure play proponents — at least not on the retail side of the business,” stated Lars Godell, Principal Analyst, Telecom, at Forrester Research, and author of a recent VoIP study. “Forrester sees the consumer VoIP hype as wild exaggerations, reminiscent of the UMTS hype, dot-com, and telecom bubble days. The ‘no free lunch’ principle applies: Someone will always bear the costs of delivering the service. Voice calls will never be absolutely free, but the hype — and the pure plays — do teach some important lessons. To avoid the predicted upcoming telecom power shift, incumbent telcos must fully wake up and restructure their business, including their innovation activities.”
 
 It doesn’t help much if a new technology is very disruptive in a market that will remain rather small for years to come. “VoIP isn’t really mature today. It faces a range of problems, including immature SIP technology, unresolved regulatory issues, and a lack of industrial-strength and scalable public network management systems. Consumer apathy and slow broadband uptake will also hold VoIP back.”

As Forrester reported recently, only 1% of Europeans use VoIP frequently to make calls from home, whereas 70% of consumers doesn’t even know what VoIP is. Coupled with relatively low broadband take-up, European consumer VoIP adoption will move slowly. Forrester predicts that VoIP will capture 30% of the residential fixed voice market in 2010 and won’t approach 100% until 2020.
 
 In addition, the incumbent telcos are fighting back: Proactive incumbents like Telecom Italia, France Télécom, and Portugal Telecom launched flat-rate PSTN calling even before VoIP pure plays became a threat, reducing VoIP’s threat to their core PSTN business. Since then, a majority of incumbents have introduced various flat-rate pricing plans, further reducing their vulnerability to VoIP pure plays. Smart incumbents are also tearing down technology silos and focusing on user needs, not technology, further undermining VoIP pure plays’ key selling points. And by launching their own VoIP services, ADSL bundles, and enhanced functionality services, incumbents are fighting the pure plays on their own turf.
 
“Incumbents have many advantages — if they respond in time and with force,” Godell noted. “They are well used to fighting low-cost voice competition: BT has been doing that for 23 years. The incumbents have significant advantages in brand name, scope (bundling), scale, customer base, billing, and financial strength over essentially all other challengers, although they do need to improve their customer satisfaction ratings. And while big global portals like MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, and Google have recently made acquisitions and service launches around VoIP and IM voice chat, they will never be able to claim national consumer VoIP market leadership in any Western European country.”
 
Forrester believes that VoIP pure plays will fail in the new telecom world. Falling short of true disruptive potential, lacking all the important advantages of incumbent telcos, and facing more intense VoIP competition from all comers, VoIP pure plays like sipgate, Telio, Gossiptel, and Vonage will not be able to survive for long as profitable free-standing companies. Skype’s investors were lucky to be able to bail out to eBay before the consolidation game kicked in. In Norway, that game has already delivered more than 20 VoIP pure play casualties in less than nine months. The best the pure plays can hope for is to be acquired — or to license their often interesting technology and service concepts.

Partners pledge lower costs and quicker time to market for online bank services and announce first joint deal with Spanish banking group BBVA

Intelligent Environments (iE) and Mistral have signed a partnership agreement to provide application development and hosting services for banks. Online financial software specialist iE and business connectivity services provider Mistral say the agreement will enable banks to deploy secure, scalable online services faster and at lower cost than in-house IT departments.

Spanish banking group BBVA is the partnership’s first customer. BBVA is using iE’s NetFinance software running on Mistral-hosted servers to support its innovative new credit card aimed at frequent travellers.

According to iE and Mistral, the alliance is based on complementary business and technical skills in a sector where both firms are already strong players. iE’s client list includes HBOS, HSBC, RBS and The Bank of New York, while Mistral provides services to Lloyds TSB, RBS and M&G Prudential, among others.

Jerry Mulle, director of sales and marketing, iE, said: “NetFinance has helped our customers deliver secure, scalable, high-performance financial applications online. But even the best-run systems can run into problems when transaction volumes grow beyond the capacity of the hardware or the network has insufficient bandwidth to handle peak loads.

“In Mistral, we have a partner who can guarantee that whatever promises we make about the quality of the software will be kept from the moment the application is deployed to the end of its operational life.”

Jason Vaughan-Phillips, business development manager, Mistral, said: “For the client, the key issues are peace of mind and cost of ownership. Quantity of service factors – processing capacity and bandwidth – are important, but financial institutions also expect first-rate security, project management and technical support.

“With trading conditions as tough as ever, it’s not enough to match the cost of providing the same level of service in-house. We need to be able to demonstrate significantly lower cost of ownership. iE shares our belief that high performance and quality of service can still be achieved without sacrificing cost benefits.”

According to analysts, customers can make savings of between 25% and 32% in the first year by outsourcing their hosting requirements. The majority of projects now undertaken by iE have involved NetFinance running on third-party servers, a customer preference that continues to increase given internal IT constraints. Outsourced hosting is the fastest growing part of Mistral’s business with revenues increasing 100% year-on-year.

iE’s Mulle said: “The hosting trend is well established. Just as you don’t need to own the road to make a journey, businesses are realising that they don’t need to own the infrastructure to deliver viable services.”

Data security and Return on Investment concern end users and investors

According to a new report from Frost & Sullivan, enterprises are increasingly being forced to meet requirements from their field staff to provide flexibility and real-time access to critical data. And this growing demand has provided a boost to sales in the European wireless enterprise applications market.

Companies are utilising wireless applications such as wireless e-mail, sales force automation (SFA), field service management (FSM) and field force automation (FFA) to boost sales productivity, enhance field service responsiveness and reduce cycle time, says the report. Vendors and their target markets alike recognise the competitive advantage afforded by wireless enterprise applications. These applications help field workers function more efficiently by giving them up-to-the-minute information and enable sales staff to check inventory and field resources to guarantee their clients the immediate delivery of goods.

As an example, wireless SFA facilitates mobile extension of integrated, front office Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to sales personnel so that they can plan, schedule and control the pre- and post-sales activities in an organisation. The benefits provided by SFA include access to product and pricing information, updates on changes to sales promotions, access to customer account information, and real-time ordering capabilities. This constitutes an outstanding level of customer service and provides real benefits to companies in terms of sales levels and sales renewals from satisfied clients, says Frost & Sullivan.

Mainly targeted toward service and repair technicians, FFA provides mobile employees with access to software designed to automate core business processes as well as coordinate work orders and related activities through rugged, handheld devices. Another wireless application, FSM, helps manage and monitor assets, employees and services. It allows enterprises to reduce expenses associated with the delivery of products and services through improved monitoring of mobile assets.

However, despite these multiple benefits, it is wireless e-mail, which allows end users to access and respond to e-mails in remote locations, that dominates the wireless enterprise applications market in terms of adoption rates. This is partly due to the fact that it was the first application to be developed by vendors in the market and is being used as a test bed for other wireless applications.

Furthermore – the report continues – the existence of millions of untapped corporate and private e-mail accounts the world over ensures continued growth in this segment. While many wireless enterprise applications are yet to offer the full range of functionalities provided by their fixed network-based counterparts, their ability to respond to customer requirements in real time is truly compelling.

However, potential investors are concerned about data security in wireless enterprise applications. It is a complex issue that requires monitoring at a number of levels, beginning with the transmission of data and the physical security of wireless devices to supervising security at both technical and policy levels. Applications vendors, security vendors and mobile operators have to work together towards this end. They also need to educate the end user market, which remains the most vulnerable to security risks, to guarantee wireless and mobile security.

Though many wireless enterprise application vendors have proven successful in mobilising sales and can point to a strong track record in their Returns On Investment (ROI), every implementation is different and carries its own risks and rewards, points out Frost & Sullivan in the report. Proving that the rewards outweigh the risks gets easier as the market grows: vendors learn to maximise opportunities in their potential markets, reference customers become more plentiful, and a larger pool of independent resources and advice are made available.

However, many end users remain unconvinced that they will see such returns within an acceptable period. Others are still not clear of the total cost of ownership, including start-up costs. In addition, there are considerable on-going costs of services, which are less quantifiable at the early investment stage. Companies have to solve these issues before any competitive advantage can be gained and ROI is met.

Enterprises and vendors need to seamlessly integrate applications within the existing organisational systems and train the workforce in using the devices to accelerate adoption rates, concludes Frost & Sullivan.