Symbian licenses Microsoft Exchange software

Rethink IT, May, 2005

The Nokia-dominated Symbian consortium has licensed software from Microsoft that will allow it to develop a plug-in messaging architecture for its mobile operating system, that will allow it to synchronize directly with Microsoft's Exchange Server email system.

This is important for several reasons. It shows that, despite Nokia's ambitions to provide an alternative client platform to Windows in the enterprise, Microsoft cannot be so easily bypassed in its home territory. It also hints at a similar realization by the software giant that its success in the mobile and wireless market will be better achieved by drawing the mobile specialists into its middleware platforms than by seeking to extend the hegemony of Windows beyond the PC to the emerging business clients.

A year ago, no such flexibility was being displayed by either side. Microsoft was still on a quest to make Windows Mobile a mainstream cellphone operating system, creating a new breed of handsets in the image of the Wintel PC. Nokia, meanwhile, had an agenda to use the rising enterprise adoption of mobile clients to create a new business stream for itself, and to promote its core technologies SymbianOS, the Series 60 software architecture and its own email and security capabilities as direct alternative to Windows.