Score another win for Windows Phone 7, as Dell has dumped RIM’s Blackberry platform for it’s own Windows Phone 7 device, Venue Pro. While Dell is making a good decision issuing it’s own employees their own product, they are also putting a lot of faith in Windows Phone 7 (which is awesome). The more these big businesses jump in, the more the enterprise and consumer market will trust the product. Expect to see a whole lot of Blackberries on EBay sometime soon!
One benefit of the move, says Dell, is that it will see a 25% savings in its mobile communications. That savings comes from ditching not only the BlackBerries, but RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server for email services. The WP7 platform natively supports Exchange ActiveSync for corporate email. Gladden admits that not all companies would see such significant savings, but points out that SMBs could benefit by getting rid of the BlackBerry servers.
Gladden says that the company plans to offer enterprises a way to pry BlackBerry out of their internal systems and switch to Dell’s new devices and services. “I’m not sure I care as much about the devices as the services,” he said. “There’s a services opportunity that we think is even bigger.”