According to ZDNet Austrailia, HSBC is considering swapping out it’s current BlackBerry deployment and replacing it with the iPhone. The CIO of HSBC Austrailia and New Zeland, Brenton Hush, was quoted saying “We are actually reviewing iPhones from a HSBC Group perspective … and when I say that, I mean globally“.
In my other life I’ve dealt with HSBC quite a bit and let me tell you that they are always considering doing something other than what they are currently doing. I remember several years ago how they were considering moving to Linux desktops.
At the end of the day you’ve got to consider the “Why”. What does HSBC gain by switching from the BlackBerry to the iPhone? If they gain anything does it warrant a global rollout to a completely new platform. Buying 200,000 iPhones is the easy part. Everything that comes along with swapping them in and replacing all those BlackBerrys would take years and cost $10s of millions.
I am not saying that this won’t ever happen. I just can’t imagine it happening anytime in the near future.
If I were a betting man and knowing HSBC, it’s not happening. Yada yada yada is what they basically announced yesterday.
Maybe they have some application in mind for the iphone. Sometimes change is good. Too many companies subscribe to the old “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” mentality.
Tell that to the IT Managers who migrated over to Vista. 🙂
Sound like exciting. Not that I am more favor to iPhone but want to have more competition in the mobile world. I also like to see Nokia, Samsung, LG and many other phone to catch up and make great products and low cost for us, the consumers.
Let me look at it at a completely different angle:
I think HSBC uses this announcement as a “free” promotion to the company, a marketing scheme. No matter what they decide, they got a lot of attention. What’s better than free ad? And it is not even a bad rep, is it?
To all those who said it would never happen, look it’s happening.
The HSBC story was a pile of hype. An inside source at HSBC now says “there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell” according to Judy Mottl’s blog:
http://blog.internetnews.com/jmottl/2008/08/when-a-story-isnt-a-story.html