Cingular Adding GoodLink E-Mail Service

Tuesday, May 31st 2005, 10:39 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ Cingular Wireless is adding Good Technologies Inc.'s mobile e-mail service to its product lineup for business customers and offering a sizable discount, a big boost for Good as it wrestles for market share with the dominant BlackBerry service.

Though the company's GoodLink service is compatible with mobile devices offered by many wireless service providers, Tuesday's announcement marks the first time the product will be sold directly by a major carrier in nearly a year.

By contrast, Cingular and the other four national cell carriers already sell BlackBerry devices, from Research In Motion Ltd., and its complimentary e-mail system directly to their corporate customers.

A year ago, Good Technologies stopped shipping an e-mail device that Cingular supports.

Real-time wireless access to e-mail and other information such as calendars and contacts is increasingly seen as a must-have business tool _ particularly for mobile workers but also to enable non-mobile workers to stay in contact when they're away from the office.

As a result, a wide range of software and device makers are targeting the market, including Microsoft Corp., Nokia Corp. and PalmOne Inc.

Users of BlackBerry, the pioneering device and service for reading e-mail and thumb-typing on a mini-keyboard, grew to 2.5 million by the end of March, up from about 1 million a year earlier.

Good is also experiencing rapid growth, though its customer base remains far smaller than RIM's. The company doesn't disclose user numbers but says it now has about 6,000 corporate accounts, up from 4,000 at the end of last year.

Cingular is bundling the GoodLink service with its wireless Internet service for mobile phones at no extra cost, charging $45 a month for unlimited usage. Previously, users also paid the equivalent of $27.50 a month to GoodLink.

There is also a one-time account fee of $1,500 plus a one-time set-up fee of $99 for each individual user.

Two devices sold by Cingular, the Treo 650 and the Siemens SX66 Pocket PC, are currently compatible with GoodLink though more are expected later this year, the companies said.

``Although we'll be making less per subscriber, we think we'll end up with far more subscribers,'' said Danny Shader, Good's chief executive, noting Cingular's size and reach.

Cingular had 50.4 million customers at the end of March but does not disclose how many of them are business users.

The new arrangement also means that Cingular, owned jointly by SBC Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp., will provide a single point of contact for sales, billing and support, similar to the arrangement for BlackBerry.

Both RIM and Good provide their services by operating data centers which steer e-mail between mobile devices and a server behind the security firewall on a corporate computer network.

The systems sync continuously, so when an e-mail arrives at the company's network it's sent immediately to the mobile device. And when the e-mail is deleted on the device, it is also deleted on the corporate server.

Good's market strategy differs from RIM's in that it has stopped making devices, focusing instead on developing its software to run on multiple mobile device platforms. It already offers its software and service for Palm's Treo and Pocket PC devices running Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform.

In February, a deal was reached with Hewlett-Packard Co. to put GoodLink's software on all of HP's iPaq PocketPC's. And last fall, Good signed a deal with Nokia to adapt GoodLink for phones running on the Symbian operating system.