What is happening in the enterprise market?
First, there is RIM. BlackBerry is dominant. It is the end-to-end solution. Something a manager had to have, to look managerial. Even if very expensive. Now, the scenario is changing quickly.
- BlackBerry is not a must-have for managers anymore, actually it looks kinda not-cool. iPhone is cool. BlackBerry is uncool. You do not have iFartz for the BlackBerry.
- Cost is a dominant issue. More than ever. Let the economy slip a bit more and we'll have wholesale panic in the IT groups, driven by CFOs. Only the CEO and few top managers will get BlackBerry. Everyone else can be cool with its own device.
- The price looks right. Although if you talk to IT Managers, they will tell you to buy more Exchange licenses to support the mobile users. At the end, you might have to double the amount of your Exchange licenses, if you want everyone to have mobile access. Not cheap (at all).
- Windows Mobile works well, anything else... not quite well. And your CEO will be upset because its BlackBerry surely does not work. And the rest of the company might still complain because their device is not well supported, so the IT Manager says no...
- It is cheap. Actually zero if you use Funambol. Our Community Edition is free. We are not making money with it. It is meant for the Enterprise. We make money with the Carrier Edition, selling it to people that host our solution (to consumers, mostly, but also enterprises). So, if you are an enterprise, you can download it, plug it in your Exchange (or Domino, or your IMAP server) and you are good to go. If you need support, we will be happy to direct you to one of our community partners. We have them everywhere in the world.
- It supports the largest variety of devices. Even BlackBerry. The community is the key element. We are testing every phone in every country with every carrier. It is not just Funambol Inc. It is thousands of people. And developers, that port our stack to more and more phones (lastly, Android). Your IT Manager will have a hard time saying your phone is not supported.