Telstra picks a Good BlackBerry rival
Good Technology (GT) -- a North American wireless enterprise solutions specialist which counts Visa, Dell and EDS among its clients -- has forged an arrangement whereby the telecommunications heavyweight will market its solutions to businesses in Australia. Under the arrangement, Good will provide second-level support to clients.
GT's offering is similar to RIM's BlackBerry in that it allows users to access their work e-mail, calendar and other applications such as Salesforce.com and SAP via their compatible smartphone.
A back-end server behind the company firewall shuttles e-mail to GT's network operations centre (NOC) in the US, which coordinates the transfer to end-user handsets and provides remote monitoring and management functionality to companies' IT departments.
But where RIM's solution requires users to buy its handsets, GT's software runs on a variety of devices with Palm, Symbian or Windows Mobile operating systems.
Telstra will initially market the solution on phones from the Palm Treo and I-mate families.
GT's president of worldwide sales and marketing Terry Austin said its solutions were already being used by half of the Fortune 50 in its home United States market and by a range of technology companies globally.
Enterprises with large Asia-Pacific operations like construction firm Thiess, lawyers Baker & Mackenzie and consultancies Deloitte and the Boston Consulting Group have also picked it up, he said during a visit to ZDNet Australia's Sydney office yesterday.
Austin said GT has previously gained traction primarily with businesses using Microsoft Exchange for e-mail, but Lotus Notes/Domino support is due this month.
GT is working on integrating its software with the emerging unified messaging solutions from Cisco and Avaya that are speedily being adopted in Australian enterprises.
In Australia, Austin said Telstra will price GT's solution similarly to its BlackBerry offering.
He said Telstra was the first carrier in the Asia-Pacific region to build a relationship with GT, despite the vendor having approached a number of other carriers.
Austin declined to disclose the length of Telstra's exclusive relationship with GT in Australia. He said discussions first began between the two in August 2005.