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Nokia gives corporate email the push

BlackBerry bitchslap

Nokia is to give up on corporate email and pushed applications, leaving all that to third-party companies while it concentrates on selling push email to ordinary punters.

The moment RIM proved that push email was such an important gateway into corporations, everyone started furiously developing competing services while carefully stepping around RIMs patents (often unsuccessfully).

Nokia's effort culminated in the purchase of Intellisync in 2005 for $430m, with the intention of offering businesses a push-email solution with a Nokia brand.

But the plethora of competing technologies, along with the obtuse reluctance of IT departments to support a wide variety of email gateways, has made the market fiercely competitive. It's also a business that doesn't really fit with Nokia's consumer-services-brand aspirations, so the company says that in future it will "form its enterprise solutions... by combining Nokia devices and applications with software solutions from industry leading enterprise vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and others".

The Intellisync business isn't big enough to be worth selling off as a going concern, so the company is left to claim that "technologies and expertise will be reallocated to Nokia's new consumer push email service" - so a $430m investment gets folded into the Ovi service and the Intellisync brand disappears entirely.

Meanwhile Nokia's security-appliance business is being wrapped up for a potential sale as part of what Nokia calls its "renewal of its business mobility strategy".

Microsoft, RIM and their ilk might have corporate email sewn up, but Nokia believes the market for personal email services is still wide open - though between Google and Apple the opportunity won't last much longer. ®

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