RIM Radar and Rumor Mill

When it rains, it pours, and 2011 has been proof of that for Research In Motion (RIM).

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company that once owned the enterprise mobile email market with its BlackBerry handsets and secure email service has faced unprecedented hurdles this year. The most recent setback: Google has said that, starting next week, it will no longer support its dedicated Gmail application for BlackBerry devices, though users can still access their accounts via their mobile browsers or by syncing the device.

That's just the latest in a series of woes the "CrackBerry" maker has been battling since it began experiencing some real competition. It has seen Apple iOS and Google Android-based devices eating into its market share (see figure) while mobile device management companies are rushing to market to help secure and manage those clients for enterprise use.

Meanwhile, millions of RIM users were impacted last month by a notorious multi-day outage that the company attributed to a core switch failure that didn't properly fail over to a backup switch. RIM also received lukewarm reviews of its Playbook tablet and said late last month that its PlayBook 2.0 has been delayed until at least February.

Yet Still an Enterprise Contender

Yet despite these hurdles and the growing popularity of Apple iOS and Google Android devices, there are still enterprise loyalists. Approximately 95% of Fortune 1000 companies have BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BESs), which they use to tightly manage, control and secure their BlackBerry populations, according to New York-based 451 Research.

One example is a large Canadian publishing company that has doubled its BlackBerry use in the past three years.  "We're exclusively a RIM shop," says a telecom analyst there. "Our IT group is very, very tight on security. Until Apple or Android shows us that they can be as secure as RIM, there's no chance" the company will procure or support those devices, he says.

Indeed, just yesterday RIM announced that BlackBerry smart phones running the BlackBerry 7 OS have been independently evaluated by an internationally recognized Common Criteria evaluation facility and have been security-certified for its evaluation assurance level (EAL) 4+.  EAL4+ is an international standard for validating that products meet specific security requirements.
 
These are among the reasons that "mobility managers like RIM," observes Michael Finneran, principal of dBrn Associates, a consultancy focused on mobility. "They provide a good service and have for years."

However, Finneran points out that "mobility buyers are not necessarily the IT guy anymore." He also suggests that some of BlackBerry's "uncoolness" in the enterprise has do to with enterprise IT itself.

"BES administrators have been overzealous in turning off all the cool BlackBerry apps" in their security paranoia, Finneran says. "So you end up with a rock in your pocket that's good for voicemail and email. Who wouldn't want an iPhone or an Android if that's all you could do with a BlackBerry?"

Opening Up

And RIM has not done much to address the issue, Finneran says. "They need to start coaching their customers to start loosening things up. There's no reason not to allow all these applications. They're secure. They're not going to blow up." By blocking them, "they're just pissing off their users," he says.

For its part, RIM has at least been talking the talk about openness. Last month, it launched an open beta test for BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, a service that extends Exchange Online email, calendar and organizer data to BlackBerry smart phones and offers self-service management of BlackBerry deployments in the cloud.

In mid-October, RIM company officials announced the BBX operating system, a common, open-source development platform for its smart phones, PlayBook tablet and embedded systems.

And last spring, RIM committed to a multi-OS mobile device management (MDM) system when it acquired German MDM maker Ubitexx, saying the open product would be available "later this year." Today, RIM secures and manages only its own devices; with the Ubitexx integration, it should be able to deliver many of the same MDM capabilities that enterprises love about the BES to other OS types, too.