SAN FRANCISCO and GENEVA (October 13, 2003) – Critical Path, Inc. (Nasdaq: CPTH), a leader in digital communications software and services, announced at ITU Telecom World that it has added advanced mobility capabilities to the Critical Path Communications Platform. The new Platform 7.0 release of the company’s software provides significant enhancements in the areas of mobile messaging and device support, mobile synchronization, personal information management and collaboration, desktop integration and new anti-virus and anti-spam. Carriers can now offer new and differentiated revenue-generating services such as:
- Mobile access to existing email accounts
- Mobile Messaging and Collaboration for business users, with access to shared contacts, calendars and files from Microsoft Outlook®, popular PDAs, smartphones and other mobile devices
- Mobile Backup and Synchronization of contacts and other personal information across all devices and applications
- Anti-virus and anti-spam protection across all devices
The Critical Path Communications Platform – available both as licensed software and as a hosted service – enables carriers’ offerings to be easily tailored to the needs of consumers, mobile professionals and business users. As a result, carriers can reduce costs and time-to-market while more effectively attracting new subscribers, stimulating mobile data usage and increasing loyalty.
“With Critical Path’s Platform 7.0, carriers can now address the needs of the consumer, the mobile professional and the small-to-medium sized business markets from one, integrated services platform,” said Michael Serbinis, chief technology officer at Critical Path. “The advanced mobility provided by this platform enables carriers to drive adoption of mobile data services at scale, with the lowest total cost of ownership in the market.”
New Services for Consumers and Mobile Professionals
The Critical Path Communications Platform enables wireless and wireline carriers to use a single platform to “mobilize” a variety of services. For example, with Critical Path’s software, carriers can offer “zero-footprint” mobile access to subscribers’ existing email accounts, including their ISP and enterprise mailboxes. Such a service helps subscribers manage a growing volume of messages more easily without having to store the messages at the carrier or create yet another email address. Through the Critical Path platform, carriers can further differentiate their offerings with powerful filtering, anti-virus and anti-spam protection, SMS and MMS message composition and management, and alerts.
The access, synchronization and extensibility offered by Platform 7.0 also make possible advanced services such as “mobile backup.” Subscribers’ address books, calendars and other personal information can be stored on the carrier’s network – where they are easy to update, manage and share – and then dynamically downloaded to handsets as needed. This safeguards valuable information in case devices are lost and eliminates the need to reenter potentially large amounts of data when phones are upgraded. Furthermore, support for Pocket PCs, Palm® and SyncML-compliant devices lets carriers offer fully synchronized access to email, address book, and calendar services from a wide range of popular mobile devices.
New Services for Business Users
The new Critical Path software enables carriers to deliver rich, mobile messaging and collaboration services to businesses. With support for MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface), Platform 7.0 lets carriers offer integrated email, contacts, to-do lists, calendars – including dynamic meeting and resource scheduling – and shared files via the widely-used Microsoft Outlook® client. As a result, branch offices, small-to-medium sized enterprises and other organizations can seamlessly use Outlook on the desktop while taking advantage of new mobile messaging services, such as alerts, wireless synchronization and access from mobile devices including PDAs such as Pocket PC and Palm. In addition, Critical Path offers server-based anti-virus protection powered by Symantec™ and anti-spam that enable carriers to centrally guard subscribers without any per-client software or maintenance.
Platform 7.0 will be generally available from Critical Path in the fourth quarter. The Critical Path Communications Platform is used by over 200 wireless and wireline carriers around the world. The modular, integrated platform offers proven scalability, performance and low cost of ownership. It enables carriers to deploy Critical Path’s solutions for Mobile Messaging and PIM (personal information management), Universal Address Book, and Multimedia Messaging incrementally and to integrate with existing services and infrastructure, reducing cost, risk and time-to-market. The Critical Path Communications Platform is offered both as licensed software and as hosted services. More information on Critical Path’s solutions for carriers is available at www.criticalpath.net/solutions/wirelessSP/.
Ernst van der Ploeg
Regional Sales Director
for Critical Path BENELUX
+31 (0) 6 512 7060 phone
+31 (0) 6 105 48013 fax
A Global Leader in Digital Communications Software and Services