if connected

People’s unofficial use at work of personally-bought smartphones will lead to personal devices and personal information being managed by corporate IT departments. RIM has just announced BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, a new product to help companies manage the proliferation of employee-bought smartphones and tablets connecting to company networks.

Fusion has support for employees to use a single device for both work and home, the ability to manage multiple devices per person — critical in an era where individuals routinely use smartphones, tablets and notebook PCs in tandem — and self-service for individual employees to lock their phone if it’s lost or stolen.

But consumer smartphone owners already routinely have many of these abilities, even if their smartphones are not used for work, or provided by their employer. While RIM has been slow to extend its core expertise into the consumer market, other than with BlackBerry Messenger (BBM),  numerous other companies have jumped into the fray and offered consumer versions BlackBerry’s enterprise features upon which RIM’s phone success was originally built.

The ‘ITization of the Person’ is already well underway. Here’s a selection of the many examples where consumers have corporate-style IT tools to manage their digital lives:-  Read the rest of this entry »

RIM’s BlackBerry customers are experiencing a further outage as the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) fails again (BBC News coverage) for the second day of problems. The issues started yesterday, on Canadian Thanksgiving. RIM is a Canadian company. These service faults cover a wide geographical region across Europe, Middle East and Africa but not North America. BIS is the network service that powers consumer email, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), and other BlackBerry Internet functions for consumers. SMS and voice calling is unaffected.

This isn’t the first such problem with BIS (or see here), but the timing is horrific, for multiple reasons:

• BBM rival iMessage arrives tomorrow on Wednesday, October 12. iMessage is a part of the iOS5 update for iPhones, iPads and recent iPod Touch models. Similarly to Facetime’s integration with voice telephony, iMessage replaces an iPhone’s SMS app and automatically delivers the improved messaging experience if the phone knows a recipient is also an iMessage user. It also uses Apple’s cloud service to sync messages across the iPad and iPod Touch that lack SMS messaging ability.
• The new version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, is imminent. While Apple is the key competitor for all high end smartphones, it’s Android-powered phones that threaten to eat into RIM’s Curve & BBM toting young customers.
• RIM is suffering a fall in device unit shipments. That’s perhaps too mild a summary, RIM has reported a terrible set of results for its most recent quarter combined with appalling sales for the PlayBook tablet. RIM needs to be able to devote its resources and prestige to expand with new innovations and not run to stand still by patching old services such as BIS for existing users.
• RIM is midway through a risky technology transition. Current BlackBerry smartphones run an evolved version of the same software they have for years. The new QNX software is in development and is on which RIM’s future depends. RIM will have to persuade current users to transition to this new product range that will almost certainly have some irritations for long term users, even if QNX smartphones are excellently executed. Long term users often dislike small changes that new users wouldn’t notice.

Read the rest of this entry »