Research In Motion (RIM) isn't the only game in town when it comes to wireless e-mail. As the technology steps into the mainstream, additional players have also benefited from its rapid rise.

There's Good Technology, for example, which recently celebrated 5,000 deployments of its GoodLink enterprise e-mail solution, and others like SEVEN, Visto, and Smartner with a focus on licensing their platforms to carriers.

(SEVEN announced the acquisition of Smartner yesterday. So it now has 45 operator customers across 30 countries. The merger also increases SEVEN's presence in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific.)

The carriers then turn around and sell these e-mail services to individuals, small businesses, and corporate customers under their own brand names, if they choose; with differentiation a major concern of operators, self-branding is the preferred route.

In fact, many carriers offer more than one mobile e-mail option to its subscribers. So an operator like Cingular Wireless, for instance, delivers a BlackBerry product in addition to SEVEN and Good-based e-mail services.

Smart E-Mail
Analyst firm Gartner predicted this week that by 2008 wireless e-mail will become standard fare for all smartphones, existing right alongside voice communications.

We expect it'll to become far more prevalent in your average feature cell phone too, as J2ME and Brew-based e-mail solutions are already here and should become available to more users over time.

Even though the trend is towards widespread adoption, in today's climate the difference between those who are able to communicate by means of voice and individuals who can correspond via e-mail is still considerable.

The exorbitant monthly fees charged by carriers for data services are one reason why mobile e-mail adoption rates aren't higher nowadays.

Gartner VP and analyst Ken Dulaney says the high prices exist because "operators are reluctant to permit widespread messaging access to their networks without collecting fees from those who send such messages, such as spam."

He predicts this situation won't last forever, as the carriers " will lose this battle the same way that telecommunications companies lost the battle against an open Internet."

Corporate Reluctance
Not unlike the early days of cellular voice communications, many enterprises have been disinclined to mobilize e-mail because they simply don't know how it can help their organization.

In these cases, companies may want to examine how wireless e-mail could reduce the use of other types of communications, beginning with often-expensive voice minutes.

Gartner's Dulany proffers up the example of how "a business manager might see voicemails dropping precipitously and find real benefits to the fact that messages can be forwarded easily inside and outside the organization."

With wireless e-mail, Dulany says "The overall cost per message delivered is likely to be lower, given the theory that most phone calls are several minutes long and include the time to connect to the person called."

Barriers
One issue enterprises may confront when implementing a mobile e-mail system is a lack of standardization, not dissimilar to the time years ago when the POP3 and IMAP e-mail standards didn't exist for desktop messaging.

Back then, IT personnel often had to deal with corporate e-mail systems that lacked the protocols to coexist coherently.

Yes, the similar state of affairs in today's world of wireless e-mail has improved over the past year: RIM launched a couple of licensing programs to bring BlackBerry messaging to other smartphones (such as palmOne's Treo 650 and Sony Ericsson's P910) and other mobile messaging providers have either developed similar programs, promised to deliver multiplatform solution, or (at the very least) enable multiple device compatibility right off the bat.

Nonetheless, many mobile e-mail systems still frequently only support one client or device platform even though standardizing on a single PDA, smartphone, or cell phone can be unrealistic for a company.

Since standardization of wireless e-mail protocols isn't guaranteed from the outside, many enterprises must make some hard decisions about which devices to standardize on internally themselves.

That is, if it is even feasible to do so.