KDDI’s @Mail Gets a Boost from HP, Opsol

KDDI Corporation Thursday said it is looking to Silicon Valley for help with its next-generation mobile services, @Mail.

The second largest telecommunications company in Japan said it has tapped Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP and Campbell, Calif.-based Opsol to support high-speed, high-volume data distribution to KDDI’s 17 million subscribers. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Launched in April 2002, @Mail is KDDI’s photo-mail service, which lets subscribers snap photos with camera-equipped handsets and send them to other cell phone users.

The project is significant considering the number of mobile subscribers in Japan has skyrocketed to more than 70 million and the demand for cutting-edge multimedia messaging services is burgeoning.

KDDI said it is installing a HP NonStop S-series server cluster totaling 120 processors and the Opsol OmniMessaging solution as the backbone platform for its mail and messaging services. KDDI has also turned to San Diego-based QUALCOMM for similar support of its infrastructure using its BREW technology.

HP said for its side of the deal, its modular NonStop server architecture will include an integrated NonStop SQL database. The configuration will let KDDI to scale the system to more than 4,000 processors, with linear performance, a single system image and no application changes.

Building on top of that will be the OmniMessaging platform. The system supports streaming multimedia to cell phones and mobile devices and consists of a message store with the standard e-mail and mobile protocols. Opsol says the messages can be accessed with mobile devices, a standard e-mail client or a Web browser.

“The combination of the HP NonStop server and the OmniMessaging solution has proven itself up to this task, and we believe that our future service expansion will display the real ability of this next-generation messaging platform,” KDDI general manager Yukio Takahashi said in a statement. “We then expect to deepen our relationship with the companies as our service expands even further.”

Timelines for the project’s completion and rollout of services were not disclosed.

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