LONDON-Vodafone Group plc announced it has launched a mobile e-mail service in the United Kingdom under its own brand of Vodafone Business Email.
The company said the service is available in hosted and “behind the firewall” versions to business customers alongside Vodafone’s existing Blackberry products and Microsoft Corp. Exchange e-mail product, with direct push functionality to be added next year. In addition, Vodafone said it’s also rolling out support services to go with its e-mail product.
Vodafone said it already had launched the service in other European countries, but the service was on hold in the U.K. while Vodafone completed customizations for that market. Earlier this year, Vodafone selected Visto as its mobile e-mail provider.
“Vodafone makes much of the fact that it can offer potential customers a variety of different e-mail solutions to match their particular needs,” commented Jeremy Green, principal analyst at Ovum. “The reality is that its Visto launch is an intelligent response to its situation between a rock and a hard place. The rock is Research In Motion (Ltd.)-whose brand strength means that many customers ask for Blackberry rather than wireless e-mail; Vodafone must therefore endure the structure of the deal that RIM offers, even though it isn’t particularly attractive.
“The hard place is Microsoft, whose enhancements to Exchange 2003 mean that user organizations can offer something very much like push e-mail, via scheduled synchronization, to end users with Microsoft devices. Vodafone knows that some of its corporate customers want to go down this route, even though this leaves it, as mobile operator, fulfilling the dreaded bit-pipe role.
“Vodafone’s response is as smart as is possible under the circumstances. In principle, it offers all three kinds of solutions-five really, since both the Visto and the Blackberry products come in both hosted and corporate firewall versions-and provides its sales teams with a software tool to help diagnose the customers’ real requirements.”
