Vodafone Microsoft's global partnership: not for Australia?

Stuart Corner
Monday, 02 March 2009 01:30

IT Industry - Strategy

Services planned under Telstra's alliance with Microsoft closely mimic those announced by Vodafone. They include Microsoft Online Services, hosted by Microsoft and delivered as a subscription service; mobile services and devices: an all-in-one mobile email, calendar, contacts, web browser, business software and phone solution including security features, automatic software upgrades, support and data; mobile phone fleet management and a new user-interface developed by Telstra for Windows Mobile phones (announced this month); unified communications delivered by integrating Telstra's hosted IP telephony service with Microsoft Office applications, including Office Communicator.

Vodafone: SMB's virtual IT partner
For Vodafone the deal with Microsoft is the latest move in a plan to move up the value chain and provide a wide range of IT services to small business. Tom Craig, director of global business services at Vodafone, said: "Vodafone has a strategy to accelerate our position in the enterprise market focussing predominantly on the underserved SME and home office markets...Because in our four largest market in Europe there are 17 million businesses with less than 250 employee and Vodafone already has a mobile relationship with a third of them."

He said that Vodafone intends to "become the 'virtual IT manager or CIO for those businesses, firstly by addressing the total communications needs of those businesses, fixed and mobile; and we are already way down the track with that course."

He said the Microsoft deal was "the next logical step...By bringing fixed and mobile telephony we get all the elements of communications and the utility elements of IT to become the virtual IT manager and give small businesses the kinds of services that have only been enjoyed by large corporate."

Microsoft and Vodafone say they intend to expand their partnership to offer services "that integrate Vodafone voice services and virtual PBX, which will ultimately provide a fully converged fixed and mobile communications solution for businesses."

What about Vodafone Business One?
Vodafone Australia is already well down this track with its Business One offering in partnership with Cisco and Research in Motion, announced in mid 2008. Certainly developments are afoot around Business One: ITWire has been invited to a briefing on the service later this week.

Business One is aimed at SMEs of between 10-100 employees and comprises Vodafone mobile voice and data services, broadband Internet access and voice over DSL supplied by AAPT, the Cisco Integrated Services Router running Cisco CallManager IP PBX software, Cisco IP phones, Cisco WiFi access points, WiFi enabled Blackberries and the Blackberry push email and calendaring services.

The individual components are integrated with each other and with the Vodafone network so that, when an employee's fixed number is called both mobile and deskphone ring and the call can be answered from either. If that person is in the office the call routes as a fixed call via the IP PBX, if outside as a call to a mobile on the Vodafone network.

At the launch last June the CEO of Vodafone Australia, Russell Hewitt, said the move represented his company's implementation of Vodafone's global strategy shift to become a total communications supplier. Hewitt said that each group company had interpreted the new strategy differently to suit local market conditions and that the alliance with Cisco and RIM was a world first for the group, but was being closely watched by the global Vodafone board.