Nokia announced today that it is 'renewing its business mobility solutions and strategy'. Nokia will cease developing or marketing its own behind-the-firewall solutions. Rather than offering its own complete end-to-end solutions, Nokia will strengthen strategic partnerships and will form its enterprise offering by combining Nokia devices and applications with software solutions from companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Cisco.
We are starting to see Nokia begins to dump its own inhouse platform/route in favour of adopting other more established platform/technology. I just read from PC World that Nokia may follow SE and Motorola to jump into Android!!!
If this is true, this can be the beginning of the end of Symbian...
Probably worth noting that the Android rumours got started because some Nokia people (employees) were seen at a Android Developer Open Day. I rather imagine they were just doing competitive intelligence. (By the same token you often 'see' Google / Microsoft / RIM / Apple / etc etc. people at Nokia events...)
While I'm sure the strategy team at Nokia will look at Android I think Nokia would go a long long way to avoid being beholden to Google.
I do think its interesting that Nokia is effectively giving up on doing an end to end solution for enterprise. Personally it seems sensible given the relative maturity of this market and competition. I rather imagine they see it as a rather small market next to consumer services / internet services in the future. The idea of working in an ecosystem is something very common in the mobile industry - doing this in the enterprise makes sense for Nokia. Its not without its risks of course... (e.g. making sure 3rd parties support your devices for remote management) but also has its benefits (e.g. the Nokia agnostic approach to push email wins friends with sys admins)...
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I think this move makes sense. Businesses want to use what they know, and rather than write whole new VPN and Exchange applications, it probably just makes sense to stick with what is already out there and improve interoperability.
In the meantime, Nokia is probably looking over at Apple's MobileMe and trying to replicate it on the consumer side (hopefully having more luck with the launch) with Intellisync.
I hope this includes an ipsec client as simple as the iPhone. 2.x firmware put about 10 percent of my users on VPN within a week. Meanwhile the S60 users look at 45820982 page documents and give up immediately. Shameful.
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