Getting Blackberry mobile services without the Blackberry

A new mobile enterprise service has been launched for those small and medium businesses which want Blackberry services, but not Blackberrys. SmarterMobile and CommuniGate intend to deliver the same features as RIM, but as an off-device service hosted by the provider.

What is the service?

This is what we call Software as a Service (Saas). This is a type of hosted service where the provider does all the number crunching and runs the service - the use of the service is licensed out to the subscriber. So in this case, a company that wants to provide all of it’s employees with Blackberry-like services can license the CommuniGate property. All of those employees can then access those services through their mobile device. The advantage of SaaS is that it doesn’t require all of your employees to actually have a Blackberry. Instead they can use their own device, but they’ll have access to a consistent set of services. What services, you ask? Here’s the list:

• Push mail
• Shared Calendars
• Contact sync and backup
• Shared folders and file sharing
• Group scheduling
• Remote lock-down and wipe
• No mobile software required - compatible with native mobile clients
• Complete communications platform, including mail, instant messaging and more
• Platform agnostic unified desktop client

Who are these companies?

CommuniGate has been around since the start of the 90’s, and is focused on what it calls “Internet Communications”. It’s a hub service, rolling email, IM, VoIP and video calling into one package, specifically so that broadband and mobile operators can resell that package to businesses. The hosted service comes from CommuniGate - the idea is that the operator hosts the communications packages, and businesses tap into it without the cost of having to download or install anything. It claims to have 150 million users, representing 12,000 companies globally.

Then there’s SmarterMobile. This is a mobile software company that specialises in jobs for small to medium enterprises. The company describes itself as a “mobile solutions company” which is a pet peeve of mine. It might as well say that it’s a “mobile company that does some stuff”. My pedantry aside, SmarterMobile must be good at the stuff it does, as CommuniGate has chosen it to deliver it’s new mobile service.

What we think?

I’m generally a pretty big fan of SaaS releases. As networks and phones become faster and able to handle more complex data, I think that extremely robust cloud-hosted services will become more commonplace - particularly in mobile enterprise, where it’s important to ensure a complete uniformity of service across a large number of people and different devices.