Nokia Has Shaken Up the VAS Market

By Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica

Nokia's announcement this week that it will acquire mobile email, instant messaging, and social networking vendor OZ once again confirms that Nokia is serious about becoming a Value-added Service (VAS) provider.

In doing so, Nokia has raised the stakes for the rest of the device manufacturers who will now have to follow Nokia's and Apple's lead into the VAS sector with services, such as mobile email, synchronization, and backup and restore.

Nokia's move will also encourage mobile operators to opt for a vendor-neutral solution rather than a solution proffered by a device manufacturer that they believe is trying to eat their VAS lunch.

In this new landscape, I can only see an upside for Synchronica because our zero footprint solutions are open standards-based and work on almost every phone in the market today.

Nokia has shaken up the VAS market - and in doing so will almost certainly force all parts of the value chain to accelerate VAS delivery to the end-user, which can only be a good thing for end-users and for companies like Synchronica.

About Synchronica

Synchronica plc develops and markets mobile email and synchronization solutions for mobile operators and device manufacturers. Products include the award-winning push email and synchronization solution Mobile Gateway and the device backup solution Mobile Backup. Based on industry standards, Synchronica can reach the built-in email and synchronization clients of more than 1.5 billion mobile devices on the market today. Service providers in emerging and developed markets use Synchronica products to offer mobile email, PIM synchronization, and backup and restore services to consumer and business subscribers.

Synchronica recently acquired AxisMobile and is set to become the leading player in mass market mobile email and synchronization middleware. The enhanced Synchronica Mobile Gateway will offer the most comprehensive multi-protocol mobile email solution in the market today, introducing email-to-SMS and email-to-MMS, as well as WAP and XHTML gateways. Document transcoding will add the ability to display a large variety of attachments, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on standard feature phones.

Headquartered in England, Synchronica has a development center in Germany and presences in the USA, Hong Kong, and Dubai. Synchronica plc is a public company traded on the AIM list of the London Stock Exchange (SYNC). More information is available at www.synchronica.com

For more information, please contact:

David Clark
Tel.: +44 1892 5527 20
Fax: +44 1892 5527 21
david.clark@synchronica.com