Canadian company Intrinsyc has a broad knowledge of Symbian OS based on several years work providing everything from base ports and components for 3G, WWAN (GSM & CDMA) and WLAN connectivity through to device applications, for customers as diverse as Intel, Philips, HHP and Siemens. The other side of Intrinsyc’s business is providing enterprise interoperability solutions to efficiently bridge disparate back end systems, such as Java to .NET. By combining these skills Intrinsyc has created a mobile client for Symbian OS, and a Mobile Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which together enable the rapid and efficient development of Enterprise applications for Symbian OS devices.

“We have been working on mobile enterprise connectivity for Symbian OS since October 2003,” says Parm. “During this time much of the community focus has been on increasing shipment volumes by consentrating primarily on consumer needs and services. But we are now seeing a shift in focus to the enterprise, partly driven by Microsoft push in that direction and, in Nokia’s case, maybe partially due to the challenges to its market share. We now have devices with the right quality, reliability and features for enterprise users, such as the Sony Ericsson P900 or Nokia 9500 Communicator. At the same time operator charges for data services, which we feel has been a major inhibitor to enterprise adoption, are becoming more attractive.” Parm also feels enterprises are starting to see the benefits of mobility through wireless access to email and is acting as a pull for other enterprise services such as CRM and Sales Force Automation.

Microsoft’s strategy is also creating opportunities. “There is general acceptance around the use of the Windows platform in the Enterprise,” says Ron. “Microsoft focuses strongly on an end-to-end package using its technology exclusively. However, going forward we see strong adoption of both J2EE and Microsoft .Net in the enterprise. But there are also many global 2000 companies whose Microsoft infrastructure is essentially limited to network and email support and does not touch the core business systems that power the enterprise. This creates a huge opportunity for our Java to .Net interoperability solutions and the Symbian ecosystem to address this market.”

The opportunity for Intrinsyc is secured by the fact that while Symbian is working to address the enterprise market its technical focus is exclusively on the OS. Connectivity and interoperability solutions are being created by nurturing partnerships with companies like Intrinsyc through the Symbian catalyst program. However this has lead to a criticism that Symbian’s approach is fractured and may not be able to compete against one-stop-shop solutions. “What we are hearing from our customers is that they want choice,” say Parm. “The choice to select hardware for the value and benefit it provides and not to be restricted simply because of the connectivity. Also many enterprises are looking to adopt open standards, but are a little reticent about taking risks so if you can bring a broader group of partners it will help drive adoption because the risk is spread.”

From its beginning in 1996 Intrinsyc realized that the market for embedded devices would be significant. It’s early projects focused on solving connectivity problems for companies like Ford, creating integrated systems that linked devices across a company’s facilities, providing device monitoring and control through a centralized server. From this work the company identified two broad service offerings one focusing on devices, the other connectivity. The connectivity side of the business lead to the development of the J-Integra Interoperability Suite which enables the smooth integration of Java applications with those developed using COM, .NET or Exchange. The strength of the product is attested to by the fact that it has been adopted by several fortune 1000 companies and system integrators such as BEA and SAP.

“As a Symbian Platinum partner we have a deep knowledge of Symbian OS gained from working with licensees,” says Parm. “We have combined this knowledge with our expertise in bridging solutions to create Mobile Enterprise Service Bus as a tool to make it easy for application developers targeting enterprise to build applications quickly and easily.”

Many products with similar goals take a browser based approach to solving this problem, but this approach was not seen as suitable by Intrinsyc. “We did not want to start with the traditional browser based approach as we feel Symbian OS has a rich API that developers will want to harness to deliver richly featured applications,” says Parm. “In addition there are things you can not do with a browser approach. The Microsoft Customer Relationship Management (MSCRM) Client which we demonstrated at JavaOne could not have been built using a browser-based approach and even J2ME would have been too limited. So we built it using the native Symbian OS APIs and our XML based extension APIs.”

The mention of XML will also make it clear that Mobile ESB is very much a standards based product and as such can be used by itself to create applications based on standards based web services. “We will encourage developers to use our Symbian OS client independent of the Mobile ESB – for example to create personal productivity solutions accessing public web services,” says Ron. “But our primary focus as a company is to enable the real-time enterprise.”

And for the enterprise market the real power of Mobile ESB comes from combining it with the J-Integra Interoperability Suite. “Using Mobile ESB with our Symbian OS client gives developers access to optimized transport with compression, standards based security and the ability to access enterprise systems using legacy infrastructures that are not web-services enabled,” says Parm. Some of these capabilities were also demonstrated in the Microsoft Customer Relationship Management (MSCRM) Client. In the demonstration system the server utilizes a simple query to obtain the users phone number, and other credential, and then creates a mapping to Microsoft’s Active Directory Services allowing the user to access all the enterprise resources they would have from their desktop or a portable connected via a VPN. “We believe we have overcome a lot of the challenges associated with connecting a wireless device to the enterprise,” says Parm. “This is because we are a little different from the other players in the connectivity market as we have a deep knowledge of both Symbian OS and gateway technology. This means we have been able to look at the problem end-to-end and identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the entire chain.”

When they are released the Symbian OS client and Mobile Enterprise Service Bus will be licensed to make it accessible to both enterprise developers, who want to deploy the J-Integra Interoperability Suite, as well as developers who want simply want to use the Web Services connectivity features. Future versions of the technology will also address other smartphone operating systems.

Intrinsyc is a public limited company with a staff in excess of 100 and in addition to its headquarters in Vancouver has an office in Birmingham, UK. For more information on Intrinsyc’s Symbian Services see it Symbian OS Solutions Page (http://www.intrinsyc.com/symbian_solutions.asp), or for more on its connectivity solutions see the J-Integra Interoperability Suite web pages (http://j-integra.intrinsyc.com/).