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A year and half ago Cingular Wireless, the carrier with the largest number of subscribers in the U.S., launched Xpress Mail Enterprise Edition and Xpress Mail Network Edition, mobile e-mail solutions based on software by SEVEN. Today, Alltel, which claims to operate the largest physical network in this country, launched similar wireless e-mail services powered by SEVEN as well.

Alltel is calling its SEVEN-run mob-e-mail offerings Office Sync. In addition to e-mail, users can view their contacts and calendar info from their mobile devices.

As with the Cingular, Alltel's offers a version for larger businesses, called Office Sync Enterprise Server Edition, and one for individuals and small businesses, Office Sync Personal Edition. The enterprise version integrates Office Sync with a corporate server operating behind a firewall to deliver data to end users' devices, while the Personal Edition delivers e-mail, calendars and contacts from the user’s desktop computer to his smartphone.

The service supports Palm OS and Windows Mobile devices, so Alltel will initially make it available for the Palm Treo 650 and the UTStarcom PPC-6700. It goes for $39.99 per month per user.

Unlike Research In Motion – and like other larger rivals Visto and Intellisync - SEVEN often sells its white label e-mail services to carriers who turn around and offer it under their own brand name. It has currently contracted with 90 mobile operators in 54 countries to bring mobile e-mail to market. As of February, SEVEN had sold over one million licenses of its software.

Generally, operators offer a menu of mobile e-mail solutions, with SEVEN, for example being one of several subscribers can choose from. Both Cingular and Alltel, for example, support BlackBerry and other e-mail services.