Reliance launches Blackberry

11 Sep 2007

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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.

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