I am not sure if this is some sign of the times but I had to read this article by Ina Fried @AllThingsD twice to digest it. In an interview after the Boston business event RIM’s VP Pete Devenyi had some interesting things to say. First of all it looks like RIM is finally considering some sort of BES solution that will work in the cloud. It seems like you cannot be a tech company in this decade without some sort of “Cloud” offering so it kind of makes sense. The thing is that RIM would really have to rewrite quite a bit of the current BES as we know it to make such a thing work. According to Devenyi this cloud based solution could be hosted by partners or even RIM.
From what Devenyi says it looks like this cloud solution will only work with Microsoft Exchange but they will work with partners to support other mail servers. Personally I think RIM could do really well if it came up with a sort of ActiveSync/Webmail based solution that would allow for basic PIM sync and maybe even some device management with any Exchange server without having to be tied to that mail server. It could allow companies to easily expand their deployment though they would be missing out on certain features like intranet and file share access.
The other thing that I found interesting was that RIM is considering rounding out the BES solution with the ability to manage other devices. By “other devices I am guessing RIM means iPhone and Android devices but who knows. RIM has toyed with this idea for ages from BlackBerry Connect devices to the BlackBerry BAS solution that never was for Windows Mobile and Symbian. I am not sure what made both of those fail in the past exactly but hopefully RIM has a more coherent or market ready strategy this time around. Alternatively they might want to consider acquiring a company that already has… 🙂
What do you think of these ideas RIM is chasing? I know we definitely will hear more about them at WES BlackBerry World.
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