Nokia sees change in CIOs role

Mathia Nalappan, vice-president, -Asia pacific-Enterprise Solution,

Nokia talked about the adoption of mobile devices in the enterprise market in an

interview to Srinivas R of CyberMedia News. Excerpts:






What is enterprise mobility market according to Nokia?





We define mobility as a means to connect people with any mobile devices over any
network through Internet protocol or cellular to access corporate data securely.






Where does Nokia stand in this space?





Enterprises are expecting lot of convergence between voice and data. We are
seeing a lot of opportunity in the network space as well as mobile devices

space.






Don't you think you are a late entrant to this space, especially when
BlackBerries and Palms are already there?







No, we are not late. We feel that the enterprise market is in the nascent stage.
Infrastructure for such service is getting better, need for getting mobility is

more, convergence of voice and data is happening. Telecom division in enterprise

is looked at as a important division, with more and more investment is coming in

to this division. Even CIOs role is getting changed. Today, he is seen as the

person who is in charge of software along with telecommunication.






How do you address security when it comes to mobile data?





Security is one of the very big areas. We provide security in two levels:
Personal level security deals with device level security. Second-level security

provides remote wipeout. For instance, if a mobile is lost, data is the most

concern area. People are worried about data going to wrong hands. Now with

remote wipeout, one can delete the data if SIM is still active. If SIM is not

active, then a person cannot able to see the data, as it will be password

protected. If a password is wrongly entered five times, data will be

automatically deleted. To give a statistics, in January 2005, there were 85000

mobile phones and 4500 laptops reported missing in Chicago, according to a

study.






How big is the enterprise mobile market?





According to various studies, enterprise mobile market would be worth €18.1
billion. For comparison, software market would be €6.8 billion and security

market would be €4.6 billion.






What are your plans for India?





For the Asia Pacific region, we are providing e-mail applications such as Lotus,
Pop3, etc. with our products as backend application. Further, we are also

focusing on other business applications where details for sales executive on

market information or sales application are being provided. We are looking at

providing customized application for the enterprises.






Are you looking at encoding software solutions on Nokia devices?





Our Forum Nokia addresses this. Here we call on developers to develop specific
applications. For example, stock trading application is developed by a

Mumbai-based company on Nokia device.






What are your plans for the SMB market?





We are offering E50 series, which is priced around €300-350 for SMEs. We also
offer E 61, which is priced at €100 euros more than the E 50. Applications and

the ease of use are same. However, E 61 offers a wider screen area.






What are your plans to address government customers?





We offer solutions with group of people: we work with various companies such as
HP, IBM and Datacraft in providing mobile devices for e-governance projects.






(Nokia hosted the interviewer in Singapore)





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