From IT News Australia:
The phone maker announced today that it will cease developing or marketing its behind-the-firewall offerings for business mobility, and has acquired Canadian firm OZ Communications to provide a new focus on consumer mobile messaging.
and this from Business Week Europe:
“It underlines our long-held belief that Nokia’s enterprise strategy has not worked at all, so from that point of view it makes complete sense,” said Richard Windsor, a mobile analyst at Nomura Securities.
Rather than admitting defeat, perhaps Nokia is taking another approach. Instead of a server and infrastructure being set up inside a company (such as a blackberry server for example) to get users inside the network to sync with business applications, Nokia are providing consumers with ways to sync against services such as MS Exchange from their own cubicles. This could be a better tactic to saturate the market with business-enabled phones that the users are able to manage themselves.
Instead of having to court the IT department of a company, Nokia can now persuade users to sneak their devices inside the firewall and sync up data on their own, even without the knowledge of the IT department in some cases. This raises many privacy and security concerns if mobile workers are taking copies of data outside the network without the knowledge of management. IT managers will have extra work on their plate to prevent leakage of data through these new and dynamic channels.
I’m syncing my Nokia E71 against the work Exchange server right now.
More info:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&ncl=1252532613
http://www.crn.com.au/News/85745,nokia-abandons-business-mobility.aspx
Can you Digg it?