Banking Group Considering Dumping BlackBerrys for IPhones
A report coming out of Australia is suggesting that the global banking giant, HSBC is considering dumping its entire stock of corporate BlackBerry handsets and switching to Apple's iPhone. If the report is correct, then it would involve a purchase of some 200,000 iPhones and be a significant boost to Apple's aim to penetrate the corporate market. HSBC has around 330,000 employees worldwide.
"We are actually reviewing iPhones from a HSBC Group perspective ... and when I say that, I mean globally," HSBC's Australia and New Zealand chief information officer Brenton Hush told ZDNet yesterday.
When the latest version of the iPhone was launched earlier this year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that the company had been working with some large corporations to ensure the handset would meet their needs. Apple worked with Cisco to include corporate VPN capability into the new 3G iPhone, along with support for Microsoft Exchange. A beta program had support from just over a third of the Fortune 500 companies - indicating strong corporate interest in the handset.
Apple also enabled a facility for corporate IT departments to deliver internally developed software applications without having to use the Apple shop as a delivery platform.
"A decision on a piece of hardware like that would potentially be deployed, conservatively, to 200,000 people," said Hush. "You know, it's a big decision, especially when you have an existing fleet out there."
In a research note issued just after the 3G iPhone was announced, Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray however warned that "most businesses using the BlackBerry platform have also purchased specialized hardware, which represents a significant hurdle for widespread iPhone adoption in business environments,"
British employees of HSBC might be less pleased though - as a recent report from tax specialists, Aurora Kendrick James warned that the increasing multimedia facilities in the iPhone could result in a tax liability for employees offered a company iPhone to use.
On the web: ZDNet
Posted to the site on 15th August 2008
