Whale and SFD Partner to Deliver Leading French Cellular Provider SFR’s Application Access Offering on Standard PDAs
Fort Lee, NJ – Whale and leading French mobile distributor La Societe Financiere De Distribution (SFD) today announced that they had joined forces and were delivering an unprecedented product offering, initially providing secure email access to enterprises via standard PDAs.
The partnership between Whale and SFD, the primary distributor of La Societe Francaise Du Radiotelephone (SFR), reinforces Whale’s partnership with SFR. SFR, the leading quality mobile network in France according to French telecommunications authority ARCEP, has more than 16.2 million customers and 35.8 percent of the French mobile telephony market.
SFD will resell the new SFR-Whale offering ‘Pack d’Acces Mobile Securise’ (PAMS), which leverages Whale’s Intelligent Application GatewayT solutions to provide secure access to key business applications from standard PDAs including Qtek, iPaq and others. Designed to meet growing market demand, the launch initially offers secure optimized access via PDA to enterprise email applications. Additional packages are slated to be released in the next 12 months and include optimized access to widely-used and proprietary applications such as CRM, portal and ERP, ensuring workforce mobility, increased productivity and uninterrupted business operations. As the offerings increasingly include additional application access bundles, SFD and Whale will work together to deliver packages geared to specific vertical market segments.
Customers have the option to choose between a fully hosted mail service and a remotely managed security access gateway installed at the customer site. To ensure the utmost in customer service, Whale and SFD have engaged with leading French managed security service providers, who will be responsible for application access provisioning and guaranteeing the highest level of service.
“We are very excited about the new PAMS offering which is a compelling alternative to Blackberry devices. By enabling secure, cost effective and convenient access to email and other business applications via standard PDAs the Whale solution is allowing our customers to extend mobile application access beyond executives to mainstream employees within organizations,” said Francois Moreau, Data Manager of SFD. “A business that implements the PAMS offering will not only increase their employee productivity and response time, they will benefit from the same quick and efficient level of support we provide today for voice services.”
Francois Moreau added: “We strive to provide our customers best-in-class cutting edge solutions to promote their business operations while maximizing investments. Our search for an extensible and highly secure solution lasted more than a year. We found that Whale, with their secure application optimized approach, was the ideal partner for now and in the long term. In the world of mobile access it is becoming all about applications and we are pleased that the PAMS offering goes beyond what is on the market today.”
Whale’s Intelligent Application Gateway solutions have been enabling hundreds of enterprises worldwide to leverage their application investments by securely and cost-effectively delivering extranet access to them.
“Whale is a pioneer in the application access space, having invested the last three years conducting continuous and intensive development of our Intelligent Application Gateway solutions,” said Daniel Steiner, president and co-founder of Whale. “Our efforts have enabled us to be a leader in the traditional SSL VPN market and have put us in the ideal position to provide a differentiated and unique offering for the growing mobile access market. We intend to engage with mobile access providers and resellers worldwide to enable organizations to enjoy cost-effective and efficient email access.”
Whale’s CEO Roger Pilc added: “Using our core SSL VPN technology to provide highly secure application access to mobile devices was a natural evolution for our solutions. We are seeing increasing market demand for this type of access, and we are pleased to be in a position to meet that demand and ensure that our clients are able to continue using our solutions to easily and seamlessly leverage and extend their changing technology infrastructures.”
SFD’s client base includes major French and international large accounts in industry, telecommunications, energy, services and transport.
About SFD
Founded in 1998, SFD is an independent distributor of services and offerings of SFR, of Vodafone’s mobile solutions, and of a wide range of mobile endpoints bought directly from the manufacturer. With more than 260 stores across France, SFD is the second national network of stores specialized in mobile telecommunications and the first distributor of SFR, which holds a 49% stake in SFD. The SFD group employs 1,800 people and realized a 2004 sales turnover of EUR 240 million.
SFD has set up a structure of 12 agencies and 160 people working at the national level to address the needs of large enterprises, as well as a regional sales organization addressing the SME market. SFD has placed a focus on development of data-related services and activities, with the aim that these will come to represent 30% of SFD’s revenues in 2006. To further this goal, SFD has chosen to partner with qualified IT companies to develop a common solution to the mobility requirements of its customers. www.sfdnet.fr
About Whale
Whale is the leading provider of business driven secure access products, including SSL VPN, application security and endpoint security offerings. A pioneer in secure application layer access, Whale’s products are deployed globally by the world’s leading organizations to extend their businesses. Today over two million employees, business partners and customer users securely and easily access their critical business applications and resources through Whale’s Intelligent Application Gateway products. The company is headquartered in Fort Lee, New Jersey and has international offices in Germany, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Israel and representation in France.
Whale Communications, e-Gap, Attachment Wiper, Whale and the Whale logo are trademarks of Whale Communications Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders. For more information about Whale visit: www.whalecommunications.com.
Aimee Rhodes
e-mail: aimeer@whale-com.com
201-947-9177 ext. 1528