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Posted by Dan Renfroe on July 15, 2005
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We sent out invitations to 10 vendors, telling them we'd be testing role-based administration, logging and statistics; provisioning and management of client users and devices, including deploying client software by all available methods; security features, such as the ability to wipe and restore data from devices, and policy features, such as password-locking; the ability to install third-party software; ease of use, including e-mail operations, send/receive, address book access, follow-up flags and groupware operations like calendar, task and contact-management functions; and performance of their systems in transmitting encrypted data across wireless WAN links (see "How We Tested", for details).
Six vendors accepted, and we installed Extended Systems' OneBridge Mobile Groupware 4.2, Good Technology's GoodLink 4.0, Intellisync's Wireless Email 6.2, JP Mobile's SureWave Mobile Office and Mobile Defense 5.0, Research In Motion's BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.0, and Seven Networks' Seven Server Edition 6.0 in our Syracuse University Real-World Labs®. Infowave declined to participate, and Notify Technology Corp. didn't respond by our deadline. Visto also declined, citing an inability to support our testing scenario with its operator-driven model. Smartner initially agreed, but withdrew after being acquired by Seven.
Most of the products we tested support several enterprise messaging platforms, but for our tests we used Microsoft Exchange as our back-end server. We modeled a typical enterprise where users keep their preferred devices, and wireless WAN resources are a precious commodity. We included about a dozen different wireless devices in our tests.
For a technology like wireless e-mail, which isn't likely to be considered critical (go figure), getting a reasonable price is paramount. In fact, more than half our poll respondents said they'd pay no more than $10 per user per month for wireless e-mail delivered by a service provider. To get a handle on each vendor's pricing structure, we presented three scenarios for deployments of increasing scale, with 50, 200 and 2,000 clients. We requested pricing for one year and asked that costs for the first year's maintenance and support be included. GoodLink and Seven rely on monthly subscriptions, whereas Intellisync has an outright purchase model. Seven’s operator integration provided the most competitive pricing model, with each operator charging only a modest setup fee, but no monthly fee on top the smartphone data plan. The next most competitive pricing was RIM’s, to the tune of $14,997 for 200 users, compared with JP Mobile’s price of $82,492.50 (for more detailed pricing info, see "Wireless E-Mail Gateway Pricing,").
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