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Author: Jeremy Green
Orange has joined the throng of mobile network operators announcing their own mobile push email services. The service is being rolled out across the group's footprint; Romania launched earlier this month, and France will be next in October. Other countries will have to wait until 2007, with Belgium, Poland and Slovakia being lined up first.
Orange has taken an interestingly different approach to mobile email. It already sells BlackBerry in both the behind-the-firewall and hosted flavours, and it supports Microsoft push email. It also offers a mobile email product from Seven - the vendor on which 3 UK's recently launched mobile email solution is based.
Orange has departed from the mainstream in developing its own technology rather than white-labelling a vendor's product, as Vodafone and others have done with Visto's offering.
The new Orange Email product is aimed squarely at the bottom end of the market, with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) the principal focus. It will be presented as a messaging product rather than a data service, and will be closely aligned to voice services. Orange believes that this will help to reduce the barriers to adoption among what it calls 'normal phone users'.
Unkind critics might say that it's only right that the service is positioned as messaging, since that's how it works - it uses the SMS bearer to trigger synchronisation rather than a true push mechanism. Not that many end users are likely to care what's under the hood, as long as the service performance is satisfactory.
Orange's approach is based on its experience of trying to sell the hosted flavour of BlackBerry to SMBs. The uptake has been disappointing, it says - with price and the limited range of devices both being barriers. It aims to address both of these with its own solution. It will initially launch with a set of eight smartphone devices, including its own Signature SPV, but hopes to persuade Nokia to get the client software onto the Series 40 range.
On price, Orange has confirmed that there will be no set-up cost or licence fee and a simple per-month flat rate charge - a figure of €15 per month was mentioned in our briefing several weeks ago, though it does not figure in the announcement. Orange claims that the total cost of ownership of its solution over a year will be around 40% of comparable alternatives.
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