While specialist players like Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry and Good Technology Inc. have targeted enterprise e-mail and groupware, Nokia is hedging its bets on offering a phone which can interoperate with any back-end system and still remain manageable.

General manager of Nokia's enterprise solutions, Vaughn Madeley, said the availability of Intellisync will allow local enterprises to integrate many types of back-end applications, including those developed in-house, and make them available in the field.

"With Intellisync we can provide an enterprise with push e-mail, [but] the IT managers' issues were about how to manage these devices and operating systems which Intellisync allows them to do," Vaughn said, adding the software also allows devices to be erased over the air. "The next question was about being able to take back-office CRM (customer relationship management) systems and bringing them out on the road to devices."

Vaughn said part of Nokia's Intellisync acquisition was to allow for application extendibility.

Nokia's new E series "business optimized" devices ship with the client software pre-installed and the Intellisync server is purchased separately.