Vodafone UK launches enterprise smartphone offering

Vodafone UK has launched an enterprise smartphone service allowing corporate customers to manage and secure their data over a range of high end devices. The service, dubbed Smarthphone Professional, uses a solution from mobile security firm Good Technologies, which aims to provide security across a variety of devices at the kind of level that has made RIM’s Blackberry solution so popular with enterprise customers.

“With smartphones becoming increasingly popular, securing the way data is accessed and stored on these devices is crucial,” said Peter Kelly, enterprise director at Vodafone UK. “Many businesses want to allow employees to use the mobile device that they choose to do their job most effectively,” he added.

RIM has established Blackberry as the favoured secure cellular option for many enterprises, with more than 50 million subscriber accounts worldwide, and Vodafone UK is among the Canadian firm’s operator partners. And the firm has been working to expand the range of devices it offers to cater to a wider range of tastes amid the realisation that many users will have one device for both personal and professional use. But Good CEO Brian Bogosian told Telecoms.com in an interview earlier this year that enterprise users want to be able to choose from a selection of devices and vendors.

“I think Blackberry is a bit like Ford was a hundred years ago,” Bogosian said; “you can have any colour, so long as it’s black. People have choices now and device specific solutions are going to be increasingly limited for enterprises looking to deploy mobility in within their organisations. Less and less are people going to want to use a Blackberry by day and an iPhone by night,” he said.