Avanade enables OP-Pohjola Group and ABB Finland to experience enterprise mobility in practice
HELSINKI – October 7th, 2013
An increasing amount of companies use cloud and mobile services in their business. Still only few of them realize all the possibilities these services provide. To concretize this, Avanade, a business technology and managed services provider, together with Nokia and Microsoft, are offering large enterprise customers the unique possibility to experience integrated enterprise mobility in practice. Since May, Avanade Finland’s Enterprise Mobility team has been working on a pilot project with OP-Pohjola Group and ABB Oy.Recently, during a four-week trial period, a group of OP-Palvelut Oy (part of OP-Pohjola Group) and ABB Oy employees used Nokia Lumia devices running Windows Phone 8, managed with cloud-based Windows Intune MDM (Mobile Device Management) service. The employees used Office 365, enterprise collaboration service suite by Microsoft, to access ad-vanced mobile services of Lync, SharePoint and Exchange. They also used mobile services provided by Avanade, such as a Company Hub, a one-stop-access-point to company mobile capabilities and a group of enterprise productivity appli-cations.
Through this kind of technology, OP-Palvelut Oy has been able to redesign the way they work and its trust in Windows Phone as a company solution has strengthened. “This was our first opportunity to try a combination of Nokia Lumia de-vices and enterprise productivity applications that together create a possibility to our office workers to work more effi-ciently. This project was an excellent chance to experience how the devices, the collaboration service suite and cloud ser-vices can fit to our organization,” said Harri Nummela, Chief Executive Office for OP-Palvelut Oy. “We were already using Nokia Lumia devices but this pilot has demonstrated the benefit of boosting the usage by adding mobile services built on top of the Windows Phone 8 platform.”
“Enterprise mobility needs to be experienced in order to understand its benefits completely. We offered OP-Pohjola and ABB an exclusive user experience with Nokia Lumia devices, enterprise productivity applications and software in mobile use in one package. This was a unique combination and was easy to deploy and secure for customer, since it did not re-quire any additional steps in order to be fully integrated into the existing customer environment,” says Katarina Engblom, Vice President and Global Customer Executive at Avanade. “Phones are our most important devices today and they have the capacity to support most business processes, so why wouldn’t companies make them their most efficient tools?”
For ABB Oy the project created more expectations for future mobile enterprise usage. “The timing for the project could not have been better. We are going to take Nokia Lumia smartphones to be used as business phones and Microsoft Office 365 will be rolled out globally in ABB in the beginning of 2014.This project gave us insight of how well Nokia Lumia and Office 365 work together”, commented Esa Pigg, Manager of IS Services for ABB.
“There is so much more to mobile productivity than just email and calendar. Here we were able to give our enterprise cus-tomers a great view into the benefits of mobilizing new business processes further. Nokia Lumia devices have been adopted widely in Finnish enterprise market and now we want to help business users get the most out of those devices by introducing new mobile services together with Avanade and Microsoft,” says Tero Savioja, Business account manager at Nokia.
Avanade, Nokia and Microsoft plan to continue seeking joint opportunities. ”Many of our customers are on a journey to cloud services and the use of mobile devices and applications is growing rapidly. With the help of our partners Avanade and Nokia, we wanted to prove the benefits of cloud and mobility to our customers on a Windows platform. Based on this success, we have made a decision to deepen this co-operation going forward”, tells Jari Hahl, Sales Director at Microsoft.