Telstra first with major BlackBerry challenger

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 13 July 2006 08:03

Your IT - Home IT

Telstra has introduced the push email and mobile corporate data access service from Good Technology under an exclusive licence. It claims to match BlackBerry functionality but on a range of smartphones rather than a dedicated handset.

Good's services are available on any handheld running Windows Mobile, Symbian or Palm operating systems. Telstra will be offering the service on the Palm Treo family, I-mate K-Jam, and I-mate JAMin devices.

Good Technology provides push email delivery and synchronisation of all Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino functions, including e-mail, calendar and contacts. It can also be offered by organisations that offer a hosted Microsoft Exchange service, and this option will be available from Telstra, according to Good. However, Telstra said it was still being evaluated and no decision had yet been taken.

The service operates in very similar fashion to Research In Motion's BlackBerry: there is a server in the customer's data centre that interfaces to corporate email and contact management systems. This routes messages over the Internet to servers in Good's facility in the US from they are routed onto the mobile network of the service provider for delivery to the end user device. A management interface provides for remote monitoring and control of the handset by the customers' IT department.

Terry Austin, Good Technology's president, worldwide sales and marketing, said the launch of the service in Australia was "the first of many milestones we have planned for the Asia-Pacific market." He told iTWire that "Telstra will have a head start with Good in Australia." He declined to say how long this exclusivity period would be but when asked why the company had denied itself access to a large part of the Australian mobile market said: "The trade-off we made was that Telstra was very keen to bring this to market and invest in the relationship and we think that has more value right now than being able to have users on the other networks."