Depending how you define them, Finland’s Nokia is by far the largest supplier of smartphones.
But Nokia position in the business smartphone market has been constrained in the past because, unlike BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion, it lacked the tools to enable companies to directly connect their corporate email systems to Nokia devices.
Now that is changing.
Nokia and IBM announced an agreement that will enable Nokia smartphones including more than 80m Nokia S60 devices already deployed, to access IBM Lotus Notes corporate email starting from next month.
In September Nokia signed a similar deal with Microsoft that enables Nokia smartphones to be tied into corporate Microsoft Exchange Servers and Outlook email systems.
As a result, Nokia claims that close to 90 per cent of corporate inboxes can now be accessed from Nokia devices without the need for third-party middleware, or perhaps most crucially in the current economic environment, any additional investment.
Nokia abandoned development of its own corporate email product this year, choosing to look for partners instead while focusing on developing phones for business users to better challenge RIM, the wireless email market leader.
RIM’s success in the corporate market reflects in part, its close relationships with telecommunications network operators and its success in persuading corporate customers and others to deploy its BlackBerry Enterprise Server software which provides a secure and reliable link into enterprise email systems including Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.
Nokia’s latest announcements underscore the company’s determination to accelerate adoption of its smartphone devices, particulary its ‘E’ Series smartphones, in the face of increasing competition from RIM and other smartphone vendors including Apple with the iPhone.
In the third quarter Nokia sold 1.1m of its new full mini-Qwerty keyboard E71 phones, outselling RIM’s Blackberry Bold which is aimed at a similar high end market segment by bout five-to-one, according to Nokia. Since then however, the Blackberry Bold has been rolled out in additional markets including the US where it is exclusively on offer from AT&T.
Nokia’s Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange tie-ups level the enterpise smartphone playing field. Let battle commence.
