Many of the global businesses I am talking to within the City are still holding onto their BlackBerry Java handset solutions thinking about where to go from here. If you read all the recent press speculation, they should abandon ship immediately and grab an iPhone as “Apple aren’t going out of business soon!”.
Pressure is on for Senior IT leaders from users to provide the very latest handsets to keep up with their friends, family and image, with pressure even coming from the very top of organisations. The release of high-speed 4G services, plus the benefits the latest handsets offer the user, pressure is mounting for organisations to provide the very latest technology.
So why delay in making a decision? Why are there many users still tapping away in-between commutes on their Curves and Bolds? The main factor for those in the know is the risk of the dreaded “Bill Shock”. The older style BlackBerry handsets offer high data compression whilst the lack of features also ensure data usage is kept to a minimum, as more often than not they were used for email only.
Organisations that did make a quick change away from BlackBerry all too often have a story of users racking up thousands of pounds overseas only to face using their annual mobile telecoms budget within one month’s bill. Upon investigation, many stories then surface. Playing the radio, watching video, uploading holiday snaps on Social Media, using and updating apps, purchasing songs from iTunes etc. have become commonplace on international travel. The one constant though is that these new powerful handsets that are now more powerful than your average laptop will be hungry to connect to the internet and use data.
For those organisations that have held back from the pressure to update handsets they can hear about some of the stories that have surfaced and take time to investigate options more clearly. The mobile market moves fast, and there are now third party products that can offer data compression, granular control and reporting on handset data usage. Although this still doesn’t really compete with BlackBerry Java, it does offer a better solution than just passing on a feature rich handset to the user to use as they wish. Data Compression and control is the key service within the business arena and it will be interesting to see what BlackBerry and Microsoft offer in the future as products like Wandera are already proving a big success.
Mobile Device Management services that are handset agnostic already provide the security and control so whoever makes the successful next step into compressing and controlling the mobile data will have the complete winning formula. I personally am still a big fan of the QWERTY keyboard and I hope our friends from Canada can be right at the forefront to re-establish their leadership in end-to-end Enterprise Mobility.
