Blackberry is still the business phone leader, but for how long? Blackberry phones are the most expensive to integrate with cloud services. In order to have a Blackberry on Microsoft BPOS for instance, you will pay double the cost of a basic user license, whereas you can integrate an i-phone, a Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Windows phone (obviously) or even a Google smart phone for free. If Microsoft has their wish and takes over the Software as a Service marketplace, this could prove a rather large hurdle for Blackberry as many businesses we speak to are quite happy to go with an alternative (which is usually an iphone) as it represents considerable savings for companies.
With ‘Green' data centres being such a focus for Google and Microsoft (Google apps vs. Microsoft BPOS), it seems slightly odd that the business phone makers have not followed suit. Google are aiming to become carbon neutral which would be an amazing feat - as well as helping to sustain wind farm companies by employing long term contracts. Microsoft are also producing carbon neutral data centres and employing Recycled Energy Development on their sites. Both companies are spending a lot of money keeping their carbon footprint down and with more and more companies moving their data to the cloud, the impact on the planet could be massive as inefficient, oversubscribed, standalone servers can be dispatched.
So, cloud computing can offer us a real green alternative for the future and it is good to know that the market leaders are taking note of the public's concerns about green issues. It just seems to be an amazing and stark contrast that the business mobile phone providers have not taken note - especially as the consumer market is also a big concern for them and they may well suffer there also with direct instruction form O2. Does this mean other business phones may emerge as big competitors to apple and blackberry? Sony would certainly be keen and has been gaining some ground technologically for a while now. Surely, businesses too would be very interested in moving their business phones over to a greener provider, given the commitments so many large companies have made to reducing their carbon footprint. Time will tell, but this could possibly be a critical moment for business phone providers.
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