European mobile giant Vodafone is targeting South African-based multinational businesses through its Global Enterprise division.
Despite already owning Vodacom Business, Vodafone's newly-opened African division will not compete directly, but rather take advantage of the access the local company has. Vodafone Global Enterprise CEO Nick Jeffery says the division works as a layer over the top of all its operations, and it will do the same with Vodacom.
The Global Enterprise business promises a consistent mobile solution for multinational businesses, no matter where they are located in the world. “The idea is to give them a single service for all their operations, no matter what country it is based in,” he says.
The solution could eventually constitute a fully-fledged hosted mobile solution.
Jeffery says the company will tackle solutions from mobile e-mail to single billing sets and could even offer a single price across the globe for its customers. He says Vodafone Global Enterprise can offer a single price, because it can mitigate risk across the countries it operates.
While the focus is on countries where Vodafone has operations, it can barter deals with providers in the countries where it has no offices.
Vodafone met with 50 locally-situated companies yesterday and Jeffery says South African multinationals are showing interest in the solution.
Vodafone Global Enterprise is expected to work alongside Vodacom to gain the traction it needs to get off the ground in Sub-Saharan Africa. “Some of the customers we met this morning are Vodacom customers locally, and others are Vodafone customers internationally. What we want to do is integrate the two and bring a global solution to them all,” adds Jeffery.
From the South African multinational, the company will start to expand into Africa, through Vodacom's presence in the region. The rest of Africa is covered by Vodafone, and it will layer its division in the rest of Africa using those operations.
Global Enterprise already operates in the US, Europe and parts of Asia. Vodafone and Vodacom together have operations in SA, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya (Safaricom), Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Lesotho.
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