One of the common questions I get from customers is a need to quantify the total cost of ownership between Windows Mobile and Blackberry (or other) environments. 

We've actually just made available a tool to help quantify the TCO of both environments.  The tool has been built by Alinean, Inc. who are a leading expert in IT Business Value.  The Windows Mobile Messaging TCO Tool, an online calculator developed to analyze the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of competing mobile solutions has been developed in partnership with Wipro, the analysis tool is based on research of mobile deployments by 160 customers, and a comparative lab-based study to determine the TCO of the leading mobile platforms for e-mail messaging and collaboration.

It may sound obvious but the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a solution isn't just the data and device costs.  The Tool allows you to completely customise the components of the solution taking into consideration :

• Infrastructure acquisition
• Infrastructure setup
• IT support
• Data center server administration
• Help desk
• Infrastructure software maintenance
• User phone/data plans
• Technical support

In our testing and analysis of customer environments from 100 to 10,000 users we've found that :

• Lower TCO: The TCO of the Windows Mobile platform is 20%-28% lower than that of an equivalent RIM BlackBerry platform over a three-year period.
• Fewer Infrastructure Components: There is a significant difference in fixed cost between the Windows Mobile and the RIM BlackBerry environments due to the additional infrastructure required for the BES Servers, SQL Servers and additional Exchange 2003 backend servers.

The detailed Wipro research to support the findings above can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/business/strategy/tco.mspx

The Alinean Windows Mobile Messaging TCO Tool is available for you to try at: https://roianalyst.alinean.com/calculators/microsoft/mobile_tco