ABB Finland powers up with Nokia Lumia

ABB Finland has deployed more than 2200 Nokia Lumia smartphones to its employees and the count is still rising.

The company, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of power and robotics technologies, employs around 6600 people in Finland across 30 locations. They create everything from huge transformers and generators to small electrical motors.

Most of the devices purchased so far are Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 smartphones, though a wide variety of models from the Nokia Lumia 620 to the Lumia 925 are also in use.

In fact, the breadth of Nokia’s range is one of the key things that attracted ABB’s interim CIO Esa Pigg to the Nokia Lumia:

“Lumia has several models and price categories and they all give you the same platform and same apps for a very reasonable price,” says Esa.

“We can now give our end-users much more than in the past, with the same budget. This is a very good development.”

Key requirements

The fact that genuine Microsoft Office apps are built into the operating system for free was a major factor for the choice of Nokia Lumia smartphones.

“Efficient mobile email and calendar synchronization is crucial to our business. We are implementing Office 365 globally and with Windows Phone 8 you can use the native email system easily. Plus there’s no subscription needed for Office 365 on a Lumia.”

Also crucial for the purchase decision was how well the smartphones it chose would align with the existing IT infrastructure.

“We’re using the Microsoft ecosystem in our IT environment and it’s easier to use that with Windows Phone. It’s definitely an advantage. And, of course, HERE navigation apps are very good on Nokia devices.”

For any business, information security is an important factor, and ABB Finland’s choice of employee smartphones was also guided by the strength of security offered by the Nokia devices.

“Out of the available options in the market we thought Nokia Lumia was one of the strongest.”

Red shift

Summarising the decision, Esa says: “Nokia Lumia smartphones are well built; they’re great value; they’re very easy to use with Microsoft services and many models include 4G.”

But he admits that Nokia’s love of bright colours also played a part: “The very first Nokia Lumia 920 in the company was red. One reason was because it’s the same colour as our logo.”

To read Nokia’s case study about the ABB deployment on Nokia.com, click here.

image credit: ABB