RIM is well known in the Indian large enterprise segment. What prompted you to target SMBs?
If you look at the market from the smartphone perspective, the Indian market is still under penetrated, and there is a lot of potential. All the third party analyst reports indicate that, at least for the next four years, we will continue to see a surge in smartphone growth. From our perspective, when we analyze the user base, we find that the early adopters have been enterprises, especially large ones. Over the last couple of years, the prices of the smartphones have come down and SMBs also realize that these devices can be reliable tools for business enablement. As the affordability factor has gone up, SMBs are increasingly adopting smartphones and they want to know what business productivity applications they can use on their BlackBerry device. These companies are typically known to have common requirements including email on the move, collaboration tools, instant messaging and any kind of application that can help eliminate the need to buy laptops for the workforce.
We have launched a hosted Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) Express service targeting the growing SMB market of 30 million SMBs in India. This service will help users sync their BlackBerry devices with Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint 2010, and Lync 2010 in a pay-per-user model.
With BES Express, the product doesn’t have to be a smartphone or a BlackBerry bought by the company as the employee can use the subscription-based service on a personal BlackBerry device.
SMBs typically have a lot of feet on the street—presales, sales and support representatives etc. These people cannot do their work from behind a desk and these organizations can’t always afford to provide field force staff with laptops. Our offering lets these companies pick up the office and put it on the mobile phone.
Since automation at most of the SMBs is still a work in progress and backend integration needs to be achieved, will we see innovations around push mail and messaging?
BlackBerry has always been synonymous with secure push mail solutions. However, over the last 24 months, through our ecosystem of 30,000 application developers, we have been pushing a lot of applications on the enterprise side to corporate users. We are endeavoring to look beyond mail services. For instance, Mobile Voice System or MVS is a core solutions today.
The COI Association of India conducted a survey with companies across industries on Enterprise Mobility. CIOs from companies with 100 to 1,000 employees were asked about the applications or services that they would like their employees to get on their smartphones. The survey results indicated that the top priority requirements other than email and instant messaging would be business intelligence dashboards, salesforce automation tools and ERP integration. Some companies have also gone a step ahead and deployed Employee Self Service applications, including reimbursement claims. Some of these activities, like filling up claim forms, are considered to be a non-productive use of time. By mobile enabling them, productive hours can be saved.
BYOD can be tough to manage. How does your solution simplify things for the IT managers of these companies?
We made the solution so simple that it is almost a plug and play solution. Everything at the back end is taken care of—from manageability to scalability and security. Our service is designed for SMB customers, many of whom do not have an IT head or CIO in the organization. With this solution, there is no need to build in-house management expertise and it also assures ease of billing and predictable costs.
A lot of SMB customers have told us that their business is cyclical in nature and that during certain parts of the year, they need more employees. Some businesses are seasonal in nature; our solution takes the CAPEX away and helps them move to an OPEX model.
Do you have any specific targets in mind for the new offering?
This is a new offering. Already, our partner for the service, Global Outlook, has already captured over a thousand users. We are looking at capturing a large percentage of the SMB market. We feel that we have a niche offering as not many hosted email providers offer features like BlackBerry Balance or securing corporate data on personal devices. In SMB use case scenarios, most employees bring their own smart devices and security becomes critical; that’s something that we handle the best.