BlackBerry’s Italian subsidiary is undergoing some changes. Alberto Acito, managing director for south-east Europe, left the company in January and has not yet been replaced. However, some Italian companies have recently given the company a vote of confidence.
During MWC, BlackBerry announced a number of deals with both new and existing customers; three of them  Air Dolomiti, Banca Ifigest and Tokheim  are Italian. The first is a mid-sized airline company with approximately 550 employees, the second an independent bank based in Florence, while the third is a large gas pump company.
“We’ve been using BlackBerry’s products for almost 10 years,” Tokheim manager Corrado Fasano told ZDNet. “At first it was used mainly by managers for sending email, but in time the number of devices has grown and now we have almost 150 of them; all of our technicians that perform maintenance operations at gas stations have been given one.”
BlackBerrys’ physical keyboard is also still perceived as a plus.
“We had some complaints from our employees when we switched to the 9900 model, as the touchscreen did not really add value and the devices were less robust and reliable, but we had positive feedback again when the Q5 and Q10 models were introduced,” Fasano said.
Ease of use, the keyboard and BES convinced Air Dolomiti to migrate their existing BlackBerry devices to new BlackBerry 10 models.
“We tested alternative solutions, both on iOS and Android, but BES was much easier to manage and we also appreciated that it has now added the option to sync devices running other operating systems,” the company’s ICT director Fabio Biancotto said. “Before, some managers might own an iPhone and you had to set up a separate network for those devices, but now it’s no longer necessary.”
[signoff predefined=”Enjoy this?” icon=”icon-users”][/signoff]
