The past 6 months have been very cut throat in IT and Telecoms, writes Simon Minshall, MD of MobileGuy
The economic adjustment we’re all going through has made selling harder, and businesses need to make the pounds stretch further.
That said, companies have been investing in their mobile strategies but asking for quantity and quality.
That’s where we come in. Our prices are normally 40 per cent cheaper than our nearest competitor, so we’ve been winning the harder sell business, as well excelling in the quality.
Support becomes a quantifier of the realistic pricing we offer. But people are choosing our BlackBerry service over the mainstream UK networks.
Will the iPhone take over the enterprise? Potentially, but not in the next five years. (In other words, never – ed)
The Iphone and BlackBerry are distant cousins. One is a jack of all trades touch screen device that does marginal push delivery. The other is a Java based device specially designed to be “your office, out of the office”. It was designed to work 24x7 in real time without user intervention.
There is still a class barrier between a true push solution (Blackberry) and the pull systems (the iPhones and HTCs). When the settings are hosted on the device, you cannot call your device a push solution, because they influence the way the information is delivered to the device. A Blackberry has a one time only wireless deployment routine. Once that’s completed, the Blackberry Server pushes out the information without request. That is a true push solution.
It’s a bit like the difference between getting your post delivered, and having to queue up at the sorting office.
The Iphone is still at the infantile stage that BlackBerry was 6 years ago. Ok, it looks looks great on the golf course or while you’re shopping. But to bring it up to the enterprise standard it would need to improve on so many levels.
Research in Motion managed to break this mould with the release of the later service packs for BES Version 3.6 moving into BES Version 4 for 5 to 6 years ago. Sadly, Apple, relies on Microsoft as its Push Enabler, and will continue to be 6 years behind Research in Motion.