Johannesburg - Employees of businesses using applications from enterprise software company SAP can now access these while out of the office or on the road as well.

This comes after Pebbletree Consulting - a SAP implementation company and subsidiary of Dimension Data associate company Britehouse - teamed up with MTN Business to offer these applications on Blackberry smartphone devices.

Research in Motion introduced Blackberry to the South African market a few years ago through both Vodacom and MTN, initially targeting mostly business users. But now, it is aiming to broaden that to the consumer market as well.

MTN Business provides targeted solutions to companies. Brett Kinsey, the senior manager for partner management at MTN Business said in a statement that it was striving to offer customers a "one-stop solution in the corporate mobility arena", by working closely with partners like Pebbletree.

Pebbletree director Gary McHugh said the partnership would simplify the SAP application environment for business. McHugh said the integrated solution would be delivered under a single contract with one point of contact and service level agreement, with the billing passing through the customer's existing MTN account.

Britehouse is a software applications company, with other subsidiaries in addition to Pebbletree including Microsoft applications business 3fifteen, a 31% stake in listed information and communication (ICT) skills company Paracon, and Auto-Mate Dealer Management Services, which provides ICT services to the automotive industry. Its shareholders are Andile Ngcaba's Convergence Partners, Safika and Venfin (with 60% between them) and Didata (with 40%).

- Fin24