Reliance launches Blackberry
11 Sep 2007
Mumbai: ADAG group company Reliance Communications is now the first CDMA telecom service provider in India to launch the push mail smart phone from Canada- based company Research in Motion (RIM), the Blackberry.
According to company president and CEO enterprise Prakash Bajpai, the company is also the first in India to launch the Blackberry 8830 World Edition phone, which provides interoperability on both CDMA and GSM networks. This is widely seen as an essential convenience for international roaming.
The
company, at a later stage, plans to provide other applications such as online
stock trading, Blackberry for pre-paid, Bloomberg Professional services which
is a global service of data, news and analytics, in addition to email.
GSM
network operators Airtel and Hutch are the other players offering Blackberry services
in India.
Reliance launched four Blackberry handset models - the Blackberry Pearl and Curve for GSM subscribers, the Blackberry 8703e for CDMA subscribers, and the Blackberry 8830 World Edition, which works on both CDMA as well as GSM networks.
Bajpai
said that world over, the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) for smart phones was
eight to ten times higher than regular phones, and estimated it to be in the range
of Rs2,000-3,000 for India.
The company plans to tap its enterprise customer
base of 6,20,000 which for the Blackberry. For small and medium enterprises, Reliance
plans to offer the added facility of a hosted Blackberry Enterprise Server with
no upfront software costs, deployment overheads or ongoing IT support costs.
It also plans to offer shared servers for small enterprise customers, which will lower total cost of ownership and offer scalability and security features.
According
to Research in Motion (RIM) Asia Pacific vice president Norm Lo, Blackberry has
been witnessing double digit growth in the Indian market. Blackberry phones facilitate
email and messaging, web browsing and access to PowerPoint presentations, multimedia
files and critical company information in a secure manner.