Telecom
Lead India: Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry
smartphones, is strengthening its presence in the SMB market in India.
The
strategy is relevant for RIM as devices major Apple has started eating into
RIM’s share in the enterprise market.
RIM
is targeting 30 million SMB customers in India. Indian SMBs are expected to
contribute 22 percent to India’s GDP.
RIM
has realized that the hosted model that can offer cost effective packages, will
be the ideal solution for SMBs.
The
BlackBerry enterprise adoption is more among manufacturing, professional
services, education and IT-ITES segments.
RIM,
in association with Global Outlook, a cloud-based business communication
service provider, has launched hosted BlackBerry Enterprises Server (BES)
service for enterprises and SMB customers in India.
This
service will enable enterprise and SMB organizations to leverage the hosted
services model for MS Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, Lync 2010 and BlackBerry
services in a pay per user format.
BlackBerry
Enterprise Server Express works with Microsoft Exchange 2010, 2007 and 2003 and
Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2008 and 2003 to provide users with
secure, push-based, wireless access to email, calendar, contacts, notes and
tasks, as well as other business applications and enterprise systems behind the
firewall. Importantly, the new server software utilizes the same robust
security architecture found in BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
The
new BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express software will be provided free of
charge in order to address two key market opportunities.
First,
the software offers economical advantages to small and mid-sized businesses
(SMBs) that desire the enterprise-grade security and manageability of
BlackBerry® Enterprise Server but don’t require all of its advanced features.
Second,
more and more consumers are purchasing BlackBerry smartphones and the free
BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express software provides a cost-effective
solution that enables IT departments to meet the growing demand from employees
to be able to connect their personal BlackBerry smartphones to their work
email.
