Dean Bubley: Nokia E-Series Enterprise Phone Thoughts

Dean Bubley at Disruptive Analysis has started a new blog called Disruptive Wireless and posts about Nokia's new E-Series of enterprise devices. The Nokia announcement sort of flew under the radar in terms of media and analyst coverage although it seems to have gotten a lot of good buzz from phone phans.

Bubley notes that the announcement and the press conference made little mention of carriers. He states this is "absolutely spot-on from my point of view - in the enterprise, the IP-PBX vendors (and their channel partners) will be the kingmakers, with cellular providers playing second fiddle."

Bubley goes on to post that:

The interesting question will be to see which of the hybrid fixed/mobile operators are first to leverage their historic enterprise PBX business divisions and deep reach of their corporate sales forces to push these devices. My bet is on these devices (and maybe some more from Motorola and HTC) being part of the BT Fusion Enterprise service which will probably emerge over the next 6 months, possibly with France Telecom and Telecom Italia following suit in rapid order. The US market, where mobile carriers have much greater control over device distribution (and much greater fear of VoIP), may well lag, despite BellSouth's well-publicised trial of the earlier Motorola/Avaya solution.

With Sprint recently offering the Wi-Fi enabled HTC Apache and T-Mobile rumored to release the HTC Tornado early next year there is hope that U.S. carriers won't lag too far behind in bringing the E-series to these shores...