“Research in Motion, roundly clobbered in the smartphone and tablet market, is now trying to hang onto its core enterprise customers,” Ed Sutherland reports for Cult of Mac. “It’s formula is to concede defeat by Apple and Android, then sell its rivals’ victory as a reason to stay with the Waterloo, Ont. company.”
“In a statement this morning, RIM announced its Mobile Fusion BlackBerry Enterprise Server software would ‘bring together’ mobile device management for the BlackBerry, as well as the iPhone and smartphones based on Google’s Android software,” Sutherland reports. “Mobile Fusion lets corporations set rules for passwords, apps and software allowed across a number of mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as Android and RIM devices.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lava_Head_UK” for the heads up.]
WTF?
IBM?
This is a smart move by RiM. They are conceding their handset/hardware business in the hopes of salvaging their strong position in the enterprise.
Blackberry popularity in the enterprise was built on 2 legs. The first was access to email everywhere. The second, and ultimately the more important, was the ability to manage and lock down the devices. Managing thousands of devices is not a trivial problem for large organizations.
If RIM can help companies manage their employees’ IOS and Android devices, they have a winner. They will, however, be a much different company than the handset company they started as.
Will this be a hobbled slap together POS? So that their BB would look sweet to IT dufuses?
That’s might be kind of clever. I don’t understand what the appeal of blackberry phones are, but I think it has something to do with how they connect to a blackberry servers to share information. If they make a blackberry app that runs on iOS and an Android, that offers the same connection to blackberry servers, then blackberry fans with new phones would jump on it. But I still have no clue what the appeal of tying phones to blackberry servers are.
Oh, how the lame have fallen.
This keeps RIMM in front of its enterprise clients and buys It time to reinvent Blackberry. Smart move.
Uhhhhh, thanks Mr. Silly Balls, we won’t be needing your services any more…
I think this is too little too late. My company has iPhones already deployed and has figured out how to secure them without RIM. The blackberries continue to have problem with basic things such as reconciling to inboxes and service continuity.
I thought that the success of the iPhone and the android phones in business showed that it wasn’t necessary to use a closed system like the Blackberry mail/servers. Maybe BB has realized that their phone/tablet days are few, they are trying to save something. Make a little money off those notorious servers…
Shit nobody understands for idiots who don’t know what they need.
RIM certainly is at their “Waterloo”, alright.
They are entering an established market of big players (Search for “mobile device management providers”). Best of luck to them.
So what are the odds that Apple will let an app into the store that hijacks control of their devises?
I wish RIM the best of luck.
How will this be different from, or better than, Good for Enterprise (www.good.com)?
Hope their strategy work….