RIM CEO Shakeup: It's a Start

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) finally has a new CEO. But while replacing long-time co-chiefs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie has been hailed as a necessary and bold move, it's not a magic bullet that will redeem the beleaguered company overnight.  RIM remains in urgent need of a top marketing executive - not to mention some decent touchscreen technology, more apps and a little pizzazz.

The company is already scurrying to find a chief marketing officer "ASAP," said Thorsten Heins, the company's newly appointed CEO, in a conference call last week. "This is an element we need to strengthen." RIM has been minus a CMO since last March, when Keith Pardy left the company.

Heins, who has been with RIM since late 2007 in a co-chief operating officer role and who was formerly chief technology officer at Siemens AG, acknowledged that the company needs to "have more of an ear to the consumer market and understand trends."

Catching Up with the Times

RIM has long had a strong reputation in the enterprise. However, its more recent growth was coming from the consumer market - that is, until iPhone and Android-based smart phones hit the shelves and consumers started ditching their loyalty to RIM. Change at the top has been sorely needed ever since.

Lazaridis and Balsillie have stepped aside to let Heins take the helm, though the two will remain on the company's board. The board also unanimously named current director and former Toronto Stock Exchange CEO Barbara Stymiest independent board chair.

The shakeup follows a year of pitfalls, missteps and bad luck for RIM. The company recently took a $485 million write-down because of unsold PlayBook tablet computers, for example. It slashed the price of its entry-level BlackBerry smart phone to $299 and forecast fewer unit sales for next quarter. It also  missed important delivery dates for handset and tablet upgrades.

"Mike and Jim's departure was long overdue," says Michael Finneran, principal of mobility consulting firm dBrn Associates, and longtime RIM watcher. "RIM is still profitable, has 75 million subscribers and a globally recognized brand," he acknowledges. Yet the company has yet to produce a touchscreen phone to rival the iPhone or Android experience, he says. And the long-awaited BlackBerry 10 (formerly "BBX") devices built on the operating system technology RIM acquired with QNX Software Systems in 2010 aren't due to ship until later this year.

Heins confirmed that the once-delayed PlayBook 2.0 software is now still on track to ship in February, will include a native email client and will have the ability to run Android applications.

Beware Complacency in the Enterprise

And what of the 250,000 enterprise customers RIM says it currently serves?

Yesterday, RIM announced the general availability of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services  for Microsoft Office 365, which extends Microsoft Exchange Online to BlackBerry smartphones and allows customers to manage their BlackBerry deployments in the cloud. And the company said last month that its BlackBerry Mobile Fusion multi-OS mobile device management (MDM) system, initially due in late 2011, would finally ship in early 2012. As of this writing, however, the BlackBerry Mobile Fusion Web site simply states "Coming in 2012."

Multi-OS MDM has become table stakes in today's "bring your own device," or BYOD, business settings. RIM management and security has only worked with its own devices, meaning businesses that use a mix of BlackBerry, Apple iOS, Android and other mobile OSs need separate management systems, which could be a deterrent to RIM solutions going forward.

Heins asserted last week: "We're well positioned with enterprises and CIOs." And, indeed, highly security-conscious enterprises have said in the past that they'd remain with RIM until consumer-class suppliers can prove that their platforms are as airtight as the BlackBerry system.

But RIM shouldn't get complacent about its business following, either.

"We've been looking at moving away from RIM for awhile because its technology is just too antiquated compared to the new stuff coming out," says the telecommunications manager at an Arlington, Va., financial services firm. "Even the new touchscreen version is a pale image of what iPhone and Android platforms have accomplished."

Still, RIM has money in the bank, and it's far more challenging for existing businesses to extricate themselves from their RIM investments than it is for consumers to just swap out a phone or a tablet.