Synchronica bags second African contract

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Brinkschulte said the recent deal validated the firm’s strategy of working through channel partners.

Synchronica, a UK based company specialising in push email software, has won a contract to deploy its Mobile Gateway product for a second mobile operator in North Africa.

The company said this week it had received a purchase order worth US$248,000 from a North-African mobile operator, which will use the product to offer 70,000 subscribers push email services.

The order for Mobile Gateway, which allows low-end handsets to send and receive emails, follows closely from a contract win for a 20,000 user license with another North-African mobile operator at the end of July.

Synchronica said both orders were received through the same channel partner, referred to only as a “major network equipment provider”.

“This deal once again validates our strategy of using major network equipment providers to scale our business on a global basis and reach as many countries and operators as possible,” said Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO, Synchronica.

Synchronica has increasingly been looking for alternative paths to market for its Mobile Gateway product. The firm recently signed a deal with unnamed third parties to design, build, market and sell low cost mobile devices bundled with its Mobile Gateway software.

Earlier in the year, the company signed a global agreement with Nokia Siemens Networks, allowing the vendor to form contracts with operators to deploy and manage Synchronica’s mobile email solutions.

While the spread of push email has been slower than many analysts had anticipated, the recent contract wins indicate that mobile email could finally be gaining traction for low end handsets.

ForgetMeNot Software, another company specialising in push email and instant messaging for low-end devices, is currently working with a number of operators in Africa on “soft launches” of its software.

“Africa has been a big focus and it continues to be a focus, but we have also identified the Middle East and South East Asia as two major areas of value to us,” said Paul Roberts, co-founder of ForgetMeNot Software.

Both firms are likely to be buoyed by a recent report from ABI Research which suggests that by 2014 the volume of mobile data sent and received every month by users around the world will exceed the total data traffic for the whole of 2008.

According to Ernst & Young, the African telecommunications market is expected to grow faster than any other region over the next three to five years, with a compound annual growth rate since 2002 of nearly 50%.

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