Research shows push email on the rise

Push email is the favoured means for delivering information to mobile devices, a study carried out for ZDNet.co.uk and Orange has shown.

Push email is a technology that involves a company's email servers "pushing" mail to users' mobile phones as soon as it arrives, as opposed to the phones "pulling" email from the servers at the user's request. According to the report, which was conducted by market intelligence firm Rhetorik, push email is 50 percent more popular than pull email overall — but pull email is more popular in smaller organisations.

Small businesses have a higher proportion of mobile email usage within their organisations, with a quarter of respondents claiming that 70 percent or more of their staff were equipped with email-enabled handsets. In the large corporate sector, the proportion of respondents claiming this level of uptake was only three percent.

The key drivers for implementing push-email technology are constant accessibility of staff, constant contact between users and the office, and promoting efficient communications, according to the survey. The key barriers to adoption are a perceived lack of business need and cost issues.

In terms of which push email types are being used, almost three-quarters of respondents selected RIM's BlackBerry system. Around half are using Microsoft-based systems and a third are using POP3 email. Many companies are using multiple systems.

Rhetorik polled 311 enterprises of different sizes for the study, of which 84 percent were already users of mobile email.