location based blog: RIM Gives In To iPhone And Android In The Enterprise

Monday, May 2, 2011

RIM Gives In To iPhone And Android In The Enterprise

jim balsillie surprised tbi

Research In Motion seems to be admitting that corporate IT departments won't help it beat back the iPhone and Android.

This morning at BlackBerry World, RIM said it will release a cross-platform version of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). It's acquiring a company called Ubitexx to provide the technology.

This is a profound shift, and could even prepare RIM for an eventual exit from the smartphone market if sales continue to plunge.

RIM's business has always been driven by IT departments. BES gives companies an easy way to do things like activate devices, manage passwords, push out software updates, and wipe lost or stolen devices clean.

But BES only worked with BlackBerrys.

Now it will provide all these features for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone and Nokia devices as well.

RIM is still reserving plenty of features for the BlackBerry only, including push e-mail and behind-the-firewall access to enterprise apps. Its position is simply that end-users are bringing competing devices itnto the enterprise anyway, so RIM might as well help IT departments manage them with the back-end software they already use to manage BlackBerry devices.

But it's also a smart hedge.

If predictions from IDC and others are correct, RIM's market share will continue its slow decline, coming in below 15% by 2015. If RIM continued to tie BES to the BlackBerry device, BES would become less and less interesting to corporate IT.

By opening up, at least RIM can continue to address 100% of the fast-growing smartphone market -- even if it's not with the product RIM would prefer to sell.

In time, RIM might find that managing phones is a better business than making them.

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