INTERVIEW: Synchronica CEO Carsten Brinkschulte talks RCS

But it's not just for emerging markets. RCS also has some advantages over client-based messaging products – advantages that could make it a viable alternative in the 'developed' world too.

Of course, cross-operator products have a chequered history; they're no guarantee of success.

But some major infrastructure providers are now actively pushing RCS. One of them is UK-based messaging specialist Synchronica.

It announced a new version of its Mobile Gateway suite during Mobile World Congress – with pre-RCS capabilities such as a presence-enabled address book, an ultra-lightweight J2ME client, support for XHTML browsers, and document transcoding capabilities.

We caught up with the firm's CEO Carsten Brinkschulte.

Synchronica is generally associated with emerging markets. Is this a fair perception?

We've been focused on these markets for three years, but we do use technology that's equally applicable to developed territories. Our Mobile Gateway service supports push email, synchronisation, instant messaging, and social networking - and it works on any mobile phone in use today.

Also we bought Neustar's next gen messaging assets. It was a major player in mobile IM, and the buy-out gave us contracts with major telcos like France Telecom, TIM, Vodafone Portugal and more.

(Synchronica also bought Nokia's messaging business after this interview took place. This transaction gave the firm contracts with ten North American operators)

And now you're integrating RCS. What's the thinking there?

Well, RCS is really an evolution of the messaging products we already offer - a next-gen product suite designed for 4G networks. It can unify different messaging channels. But it's about more than just IM or a rich address book.

There's the option to scan for upgrades, push updates and retrieve presence information. So, a user would be able to send an alert to find out which friends are in the same location at the same time.

We're trialling it with several of our operator partners, and we aim to have live launches in the first half of 2012.

Why would a consumer want to switch from their client-based products?

Well, both client and network based solutions can co-exist. It's like TV and newspapers – they don't need to cannibalise each other. But there are crucial differences between the two.

True, with a device you can deeply integrate the suite into the OS and then pre-install it to make discovery work really well.

But where the operator has the edge is in cost and battery life. They can roll up the data charging in their packages.

Surely you could say the same about client-based messaging. That gets absorbed into flat rate data tariffs...

But flat rate is going away. It's not profitable, and this is where operators need to be strategic about data services.

Why is the battery life better with RCS?

A device needs to go online every time is updates, and this drains power. Even just standing by for email or IM uses up battery life. With RCS the device client is asleep. It's not connected – and it's the network that monitors the IM, mail or whatever. The server then sends an invisible SMS to the client,  wakes it up and pushes the updates. The OEM or platform product can't do this.

How will RCS be rolled out?

There's a big opportunity with operator-branded Android phones. Android is a game changer, certainly. I'll admit these operator-branded handsets weren't popular in the past, but Android's altering the perception among users. And it all shows that operators are not prepared to give up on value added services. They don't want to give up and leave everything to Google and Apple.

That's not going to be easy.

I agree that smartphones have eaten carriers' lunch in Europe. If anything, the operators have encouraged it by fighting over exclusives and then marketing them hard. But I think the novelty will wear off though this year, and we'll see more differentiation in operators' own offers.

And outside Europe?

Demand is very strong from operators and OEMs Latin America, Africa, and Russia especially. We now have an addressable end-user market of 1.3 billion, and we're looking at various new ideas. For example, we're doing a project to examine ad-funded free messaging as an alternative monetisation idea. It'll be a bit like Google does with Google Mail, using keyword matches to generate context sensitive ads.