Here's something that took me off guard this week. "Nokia announced that it plans to cease developing or marketing its own behind-the-firewall business mobility solutions." As it turns out, the "behind the firewall" solution in question is Intellisync, a Nokia product that provides mobile email, device management, file and application synchronization and--most interesting to folks in this forum - dual-mode telephony capabilities for a number of business communications solutions on the market. Nokia says it will continue supporting existing Intellisync customers for the next couple years ... and the company will continue developing its line of dual-mode handsets. But apparently Intellisync product development has effectively ended. Well, sort of ...The announcement is mainly about Nokia throwing in the towel when it comes to competing against the likes of Research in Motion and others in the market for mobile email solutions for business users. Unable to penetrate the business mobility market to the degree it wanted, Nokia is now circling its wagons around consumer mobility, When I first heard about the canning of all this "behind the firewall" stuff I feared it could put a hitch in the git-go of a number of VoIP systems developers that have been relying on certain Intellisync technology as part of the dual-mode GSM-WiFi telephony solution for their communications systems. The most notable among these are Nokia Intellisync Call Connect for Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Intellisync Call Connect for Cisco.
While there may in fact be some hitches, they are likely to be pretty minor. The Nokia reorg does not appear to be a show stopper when it comes to the Call Connect solutions. "We will continue the development of these assets when going forward," said Ilari Nurmi, vice president of E-series handsets in Nokia's devices group, speaking specifically about Intellisync Call Connect at a conference call this week. "We are working with the enterprise infrastructure providers to build a complete solution with Nokia devices and their corporate backend [IP systems]. In order to strengthen the development of Nokia solutions, the appropriate business mobility software assets and expertise will be shifted from the current [services & software] organization and into the devices organization to further develop the devices capability and to work with the existing and new technology partners that we have."
So it seems that the general demise of Intellisync is not dragging Call Connect down with it. And of course none of this really impacts the dual-mode GSM-WiFi solutions from Aastra, Agito, CounterPath, Divitas, and Siemens Enterprise which rely on homegrown rather than Nokia technology.
