Nokia and IBM collaborate to deliver business mobility solutions in India

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Nokia India and IBM Axannounced their collaboration to deliver business mobility solutions to Indian enterprises. Building on their global alliance for business mobility, Nokia and IBM also shared an update on the deployment of IBM Lotus Notes Traveler for Nokia smartphones highlighting substantial traction among Indian enterprises.

The solution � which delivers direct, secure access to email and personal information via organizations' IBM Domino servers � is now available for Nokia Symbian S60 smartphones. Support for Nokia's new Symbian OS platform is prominently positioned in IBM's mobile product roadmap. 

The solution has undergone large-scale deployment at leading Indian enterprises including Asian Paints, Max New York Life, Britannia, Subros, Amtek Auto, Usha International Ltd. and Havells to name a few, which have benefitted through improved efficiency and at significantly lower cost compared to rival solutions.

"IT directors are being pressurized to deploy business mobility solutions such as email, IM and intranet access for more employees, but without incurring high costs on additional middleware, licenses and maintenance. IBM Lotus Notes Traveler gives business professionals easy, secure and real-time access to their email boxes, corporate contacts and corporate calendar on their Nokia smartphones. Direct access mail also drastically reduces the cost of managing and maintaining servers," said V Ramnath, Director Operator Channels for Nokia India.

"We are extremely happy to collaborate with Nokia, as our association will be yet another milestone towards smarter business mobility. This announcement is part of our continuing effort to expand mobile support for the Lotus software portfolio. The ability to connect securely to business email is an example of Tomorrow at Work, an IBM initiative that examines a changing work environment and anticipates trends in technology, business, society and culture," said Pradeep Nair -Director - Software Group, IBM India/South Asia. 

Customer Speak:

"We are extremely happy to use Lotus Traveler on Nokia phones as it is quite cost effective and easy to use. We expect Nokia to continue to bring more cost effective smart phones which have Lotus Traveler as standard email interface. I wish IBM LOTUS and Nokia alliance, all the very best!" - endorsed S.P. Arya - Vice President Corporate(IT) - Amtek Auto Limited

"At Usha International we have realized many benefits from Lotus Traveler; sales team can work more effectively, the average user will  saves remarkable amount of time (approx 1-1.30 hr) in a day, which earlier he has to spent in taking information from office, co-workers, Increase in Customer satisfaction improves as increase in response to their queries. Expected to achieve 100% return on investment in 12 months through enhanced workforce productivity. User is up-to-date on business communication as and where they are, flexibility to meet the increasing demands of the workplace and can send, receive and manage emails on the move" � expressed Raghubir Singh � Dy. General Manager � ERP/IS � Usha International Limited.


The IBM Lotus Notes Traveler solution is supported by a wide range of Nokia smartphones available with different designs and prices, covering the entire business user market. In the first half of 2010, more than 12 million Nokia Eseries business smartphones were shipped, representing a growth of more than 50 percent compared to the first half of 2009. 

Through joint activities targeted at enterprises, Nokia and IBM are bringing operational efficiencies and substantial savings in total cost of ownership (TCO) for IT decision makers, when compared to other solutions. The joint activities will kick off with a 10 city enterprise roadshow which will be targeted at key decision makers and CIOs within leading organizations.

Besides email solutions, IBM offers a host of enterprise applications to enable business productivity. Lotus Expeditor is an enterprise application which helps to implement the sales force application on Symbian devices. The Lotus Mobile Portal Accelerator helps to stream the information on to the device. The application helps the enterprise to communicate with the employees on the day's tasks on a daily basis. 

According to IBM's Institute for Business Value, for the first time more people in the world will have a mobile device than a land-line telephone. IBM predicts one billion mobile Web users by 2011 and a significant shift in the way the majority of people will interact with the Web over the next decade.  In fact, mobile devices now outnumber television sets, credit cards and personal computers.

Nokia offers its smartphone users a wide range of security functions -- the E series smartphones come with built-in features as well as add-on applications to meet the security needs of business users and organizations. In addition to access to corporate email and infrastructure, Nokia smartphone users also enjoy access to maps, navigation, download apps and access other services through Ovi. The popularity of Business category apps in the Ovi Store has significantly increased with India being one of the top downloading countries. 

According to industry reports, India will continue to remain the world's second largest wireless market after China in terms of mobile connections with mobile connections expected to grow by 27.3% in 2010 to exceed 660 million. Mobile service revenue is also expected to reach $19.8 billion by the end of 2010 up 19.7% from 2009; by 2014 it is expected to exceed $23 billion.