19 February 2007
Nokia says that BlackBerry isn't their enemy
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Mathia Nalappan, Nokia Asia Pacific vice president for Enterprise Solutions |
The target for Nokia’s 2007 business mobility strategy isn’t the BlackBerry -- it’s the millions of inboxes and corporate foot soldiers ignored by the push e-mail revolution.
Think of it as bringing business mobility to the working masses, suggests Mathia Nalappan, Nokia Asia Pacific vice president for Enterprise Solutions.
Speaking at the company’s Showcase Nokia 2007 event in Bangkok recently, Nalappan told ZDNet Australia that his goal was to transform “mobile e-mail into SMS for the enterprise”.
“When you look at the enterprise e-mail space today, most deployment is at the C-level and middle managers, the busy mobile executives. But they represent less than 2 percent of the total number of e-mail inboxes. The rest belong to less mobile mid-level managers and the masses below them, so there’s still 98 percent of the market that is wide open to us.”
Nalappan said that while Nokia’s E61 phone had helped snare existing BlackBerry customers, “as it’s not only a BlackBerry-type of device but it runs BlackBerry Connect software”, the company’s strategy was to chase “mass adoption in the enterprise”. This means unlocking those 98 percent of e-mail inboxes that belong to users which Nokia describes as "skimmers".
“These are people who just want to read e-mails and then take action,” Nalappan explained. “They are mostly read-only users who are occasionally connected and using lower-end devices. They’re the low-hanging fruit. But from a productivity viewpoint, this market is the key to expanding business mobility beyond the corner office.”
Yet the sheer size of this user base is considered one of the main barriers to putting expensive devices such as a BlackBerry on every hip or in every pocket.
Nokia’s hope is to capture that market with a deft pincer movement comprising of the Intellisync Mobile Suite 8.0 "mobileware" platform and new handsets including a modest "fleet" phone for the masses.
He claimed the Intellisync Mobile Suite 8.0 was a “solution than can mobilise the entire company” thanks to a simplified client which can be installed on almost any mobile device, from slick smartphones to regular handsets capable of running the Java-based J2ME mobile platform.
However, the suite’s device-agnostic appeal will be partnered with the lure of mobile device management.
“Even if you’re already a BlackBerry user, we believe you’ll look at taking on Intellisync Mobile Suite because it delivers superior device management for all your mobile devices. Hopefully these will be Nokia devices but they can also be Windows Mobile for example, yet you can manage them all from a single console.
“Over-the-air deployment is another part of this. There’s no way you can cope with the large geography in Australia or many other countries if you have to bring all the devices back to the company to install the client. So this is a multi-prong approach for us.”
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