LayerOne, the largest local competitor to BlackBerry and the Intellisync distributor for South Africa and Africa, announced today that it will reduce the price of its award-winning "Wireless Email" push technology by as much as 40% to South African companies through its partners by 1 November.
The move, which will undoubtedly add further pressure to BlackBerry and other similar technology sales, was finalised in London last week when LayerOne confirmed its new agreements and prices for the coming year. The new price of R99 per month (previously R159) will be exclusively available from LayerOne`s parent company Internet Solutions and largest partner Nashua Mobile for a limited period.
Says Stuart Hardy, MD of LayerOne: "Reducing a product retail price by 40% is a very big move for any organisation, and has been made possible by the volume of licences that have been sold to date and future projections expected in the coming year.
"Intellisync in our minds is the top product for e-mail and PIM in SA, and now it`s the most economical by a healthy margin. The service differs from the traditional ASP platform that LayerOne has provided but we will be giving current clients the opportunity to change to the new system and pricing subject to certain conditions."
One of the concerns LayerOne has faced in reducing the price of its "Intellisync Wireless Email" software is that it may be seen as a lower quality product in the market because other products, like BlackBerry, are as much as three times more expensive. The fear of this, however, was recently eliminated with the latest Gartner report "Magic Quadrant for Mobile Solutions Providers" where it places Intellisync above all other available technologies in SA except for BlackBerry. The BlackBerry service still leads the market in terms of sales and innovativeness but the gap between these technologies is certainly reducing with Intellisync having moved up in the Gartner report from 2004.
"We believe that companies will ultimately select the device that they feel is best suited to their mobile users and their mobile strategy. Intellisync supports over 40 different mobile devices in the market, 10 times more than BlackBerry, which is a significant advantage. Aside from that and a large cost difference, both technologies are excellent at delivering information to mobile users," ends Hardy.
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