First of all, let's have a look at where this is coming from. A
few years ago, Novell and Intellisync came to an agreement about the
usage of Intellisync Mobile Server (IMS) and to use this technology as
the basis for what has become known as GroupWise Mobile Server (GMS).
Only a few weeks after this announcement Finnish based Nokia bought US
based Intellisync for more than 400 million dollar, as they wanted to
expand their offerings into this segment of the market as well. This
way Novell was now teaming up with Nokia and this has brought us the
GMS which is now being used at many GroupWise sitesoften with great
success. Part of the agreement was that IntelliSync would create a
version of GMS that would run on Linux as well and that version has
become available in 2008.
Then in October 2008 everyone was quite surprised to hear that
Nokia deciced to stop the development of all their behind-the-firewall
solutions. This included IMS and by throwing their 400+ million dollar
investment in Inetllisync out the window the GMS was obviously hurt as
well. In that same time frame Nokia
announced that
their (future) phones will support ActiveSync server as well, for some
a bit of a surprise as Nokia had never been a big fan of Microsoft
until that moment (see also this
page).
Some people have suggested that signing up a deal about supporting
ActiveSync and stopping with new development on IMS are linked, but
it's always difficult to see if that is true indeed.
Even before that decision was announced, as the contract with
IntelliSync was already a few years old and was up for renewal, Novell
must have been looking at the continuation of the GMS project or at
alternatives. The problem with the mobile market is that even for huge
companies like Nokia things are changing quickly. Obviously Novell now
had to speed up the project to find a replacement for GMS.
During the Hands-On lab about GMS during the EMEA Summit in
November I had a very good discussion with the attendees about these
developments. We all didn't like the fact that GMS was going to be a
dead-end, although support and even new developments for GMS would not
end for quite some time. To summarize a long discussion, here's what
our group came up with:
A. Novell could buy GMS and/or Intellisync -
Interesting thought, however considering the 400+ million dollar Nokia
had paid for Intellisync and what Novell would really buy for a few
hunderd million (technology, developers, patents) - would it be worth
the money?
B. Novell develops a new GMS themselves - With regards to the backend, the server part, the Novell engineers would probably have been quite capable of
creating a very well integrated solution. Actually, they were quite
involved with GMS development anyway. However, the real problem here is
the device support - even for big companies like
Nokia and Microsoft the fast developments in this market space create
huge problems, for example resulting in the fact that Microsoft sync
server will only work with the latest Windows mobile versions, an
attitude that Novell would never be able to"sell" to its customers.
C. Novell adopts one of the partner solutions as their own
- There are several partners like NotifyLink, RIM, Toffa and several
others that have a strong connection to GroupWise and deliver solutions
that support GroupWise. However, taking over an existing partner or
making a new OEM does not solve the problem as mentioned under B. - device support would still be a major concern.
During our discussion we have looked at several options and then
turned things around - what if we look at it from the device and not
from the server? First of all there is SyncML, an open standard which
is included in many phones already and can be installed as separate
client on almost all other devices. Then there is RIM, as they offer a
solution to connect non-BlackBerry devices to their RIM server, some
Nokia phones already supported this. And then there is ActiveSync,
obviously embedded in the WindowsMobile devices but alos supported by
the popular iPhone as well as by Nokia and more and more other
manufacturers.
So that's where we end up now: Novell will adopt the ActiveSync
technology and basically frees themselves of the device support
dilemma - let the market solve that themselves. And they can now
concentrate on building a new GMS server which supports ActiveSync,
either by doing this themselves or hiring some other company to do that
for them.
So is that good or bad? Well, it's bad that Nokia dropped
IntelliSync, it's good now that within a few months Novell already has
a clear vision on the future of GroupWise mobility. Me and many others
will follow this project very closely and critically test whatever
comes at us - currently I'm not a big ActiveSync fan yet, so I need to
adapt and start loving a piece of Microsoft technology. To be
continued...
Gisteren (22 januari) werd op www.open-horizons.net de eerste publieke uitspraak gepubliceerd over de toekomst van GroupWise mobility middels een quote van Alex Evans
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