Nokia's business mobility strategy: for 'renew' read 'outsource'

By Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 30 September 2008 08:52

Strategy

After making a $US430m foray into push email in 2005 to compete with Blackberry in the enterprise market, Nokia has thrown in the towel and will rely on companies such as Cisco and Microsoft to provide this and other mobility applications to enterprise customers.

Nokia will cease developing or marketing its own business mobility solutions and the technologies and expertise underpinning these will be reallocated to its new consumer push e-mail service.

Nokia did not say whether any staff would lose their jobs as a result but spun the announcement by describing it as a "renewal" of its business mobility strategy. To serve enterprise customers, Nokia now plans to "combine Nokia devices and applications with software solutions from industry leading enterprise vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and others."

Justifying the decision, Niklas Savander, EVP, services & software, said: "We have very strong relationships with industry leading enterprise technology partners such as Cisco and Microsoft, as well as a broad range of operator and retail channel partners. Together with them, we will use our expertise in devices, as well as the combined channel footprint and customer base, to deliver a range of unbeatable end-to-end offerings for business."

And he cited "The initial success of the Nokia E71 with Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync" as being "a great example of the attractiveness of our new approach."

Terry Myerson, corporate vice president, Exchange group at Microsoft, backed him up by saying that the recent launch of Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync on over 40 Nokia S60 phones had demonstrated that, "Microsoft and Nokia are committed to working together to deliver great experiences for our customers."

The senior vice president of Cisco's Wireless and Security Technology group, Brett Galloway, reminded us that Cisco has been "working closely with Nokia to deliver voice and data mobile business solutions that combine Nokia's best-in-class mobile devices with Cisco's complete range of unified communications and wireless networking offerings."
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