Mobile & Wireless

Orange and Microsoft ‘Converge’

Companies Launch ‘First’ Convergent PC and Mobile IM Service

by Ken Wieland

France Telecom and Microsoft issued a joint announcement saying that they will offer, beginning this December, Europe’s first truly convergent PC and Mobile IM service in France. Other European countries where France Telecom has a presence will have the service available next year.

Orange – now the brand name for all of France Telecom’s services – is not the first to offer a PC-to-mobile and mobile- to-PC IM service. In fact, Vodafone announced that it was working with Microsoft to develop a mobile/PC IM capability last summer. But, as Microsoft points out, that is not the same service as announced with France Telecom.

“The Vodafone announcement made in 2005 was about interoperability between Vodafone’s IM client on their devices and MSN Messenger on the desktop,” says Michael O’Hara, general manager of the service provider business for the Communications Sector at Microsoft. “Therefore, Vodafone supports interconnection between IM clients on multiple devices as opposed to a truly converged service – announced today by Orange – that involves a co-branded, common client on both the PC and mobile device.”

The client will be embedded in mobile devices and be co- branded as ‘Orange Messenger by Windows Live’. It will allow France Telecom customers – who opt to use the service – to ‘smoothly interact’ with the 240 million Windows Live Messenger users worldwide. Windows Live is also interoperable with the Yahoo! messenger service.

But if the service is not available to December, why make the announcement now? “It’s an opportunity for people to understand where we are going,” says O’Hara. “A big part of our strategy is to partner with telcos. We see a converging space between web-based communications and traditional telephony communications.”

O’ Hara envisages that convergent IM services will drive up customer usage, with the client being able to evoke – through the buddy list and presence capability – such things as voice and videoconferencing calls. “France Telecom's strengths revolve around voice and, potentially, video technology,” says O’Hara, “while Microsoft’s strengths revolve around web-based communications. It’s a good fit.”

More Microsoft partnerships with telcos are in the pipeline but O’Hara was tight-lipped as to who those might be.

It is France Telecom’s intention to generate between 5-10 percent of its revenue from convergent products by 2008.

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