This is Ericsson's first hosting deal with Malaysian-based Maxis Communications Berhad in the India and Sri Lanka region. The deal was signed recently, and the service is expected to be launched during the second quarter of this year. The service, called hosted Consumer Push E-mail, will be offered to customers of Aircel, an Indian subsidiary of Maxis.

Rohit Chandra, Executive Director at Aircel, says that the simplicity and availability of the service makes it easy to deploy in a mass market like India.
"We will use this service as a differentiator and to enhance our revenue in a very competitive declining ARPU market," he says.

Regarding the collaboration with Ericsson, he says: "Ericsson has been a long time partner for us for almost a decade. They have been a provider of network equipment, core, radio and a lot of value-added services. We value our relationship with Ericsson. It has been, and will continue to be, mutually beneficial."

Dhananjay V. Joshi, Key Account Manager for Maxis (India), hopes the deal will open the door for more hosting contracts with the operator.

"This is a moment of great pride for Ericsson," Joshi says. "Maxis is one of the fastest-growing operators in India. It is expanding into new geographical areas, and it's great to get this deal at this moment."

Aircel is India's fifth-largest GSM operator with dominant presence in every area where they have coverage. Currently, Aircel is present in nine of India's 23 telecommunication areas with licenses secured for the remaining 14 areas. Aircel is on track to become a pan-India operator.

Alok Mittal, Service Account Manager for Maxis (India), says that Aircel customers are ideal end users for the Consumer Push E-mail service.

"The service is based on SMS and MMS messaging, which is supported even by the most basic handsets," he says. "It is also a service that doesn't require the user to download a client to their phone."

Mittal says that the CPE service's primary target audience is teenagers and young adults who e-mail regularly in cybercafés using free web e-mail accounts. With a basic phone and CPE, they no longer have to return to the cybercafé and pay a fee to use their e-mail account.

Several features of the service are tailor-made for the consumer market, such as multi-account capability, and the fact that there is no need for subscribers to download and install a client to their phone. The service is, in fact, so easy to set up and use that it has great potential for mass adoption in India.

Hosting is part of Ericsson's Managed Services offering. The aim of the Hosting business model is to deliver appealing services quickly to the market, managing the complexity by leveraging on Ericsson's skill and scale in order to keep the operators' costs down.