Two New Screenshots Show “BlackBerry Balance” at Work

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This month we have been learning more and more about RIM’s “BlackBerry Balance” program/solution that hopes to marry work and personal information on one BlackBerry. This has been a struggle for RIM as more employee owned smartphones enter the work place and RIM started dealing with it in the previous release of BES.

According to CIO.com the upcoming BES 5.0.3 will be coming with a new BlackBerry Balance feature that lets admins further segregate work and personal information on one device. It will allow administrators to wipe only work data and apps from a device without touching personal data. It also allows admins to segregate the interactions between work data/apps and personal apps. In other words it will allow BES admins to add users to the BES server without putting restrictions on the personal use of the device. I am not sure how much big corporations with restrictive IT policies are going to care about this but smaller shops and areas of larger corporations that cannot justify paying for employee devices will definitely benefit.

Personally I think RIM could make an even bigger play in the enterprise market if they simply made BES Premium totally free and just charged for support. I know it sounds kind of crazy but RIM makes less than 10% of their revenue from BES sales and support while most of it (85%+) comes from device sales last time I checked. It would be ballsy but it could wipe companies like Good Technology off the map since they would be competing with a free solution.

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