by Sali Earls
BlackBerry is a wireless communications solution designed for mobile professionals and enterprises who want to be able to quickly and easily manage their business and personal communications while on the move.
BlackBerry is developed and manufactured by Research In Motion, and was
launched in North America in January 1999. BlackBerry was first introduced to Europe in September 2001. It took five years to reach one million users, 10 further months to reach 2 million subscribers
and then five more moths to reach the three million user mark. BlackBerry growth has been rapid and
Research In Motion predicts to reach the five million subscriber milestone by the end of the fiscal year.
Lee Underwood, Commercial Relationship Director at Research in Motion told Sali Earls more about the company and their products.
Media coverage has made BlackBerry the must have accessory for the executive. How have you achieved this success, and just what is it about your products that makes them so popular?
I believe BlackBerry has been so successful is because it fulfilled a need that hadn't yet been fulfilled.
BlackBerry made it possible to take what people need in order to work and communicate and mobilise it.
Research In Motion offer the whole end to end solution, by providing the handset, the middleware and the contact with the mobile operators so that the data sent is encrypted and routed over the cellular network to securely arrive with the intended party.
In the UK, BlackBerry is present with all the GSM operators, working with Orange, Vodafone, 02 and T-Mobile to provide a channel into the marketplace.
How does BlackBerry ensure that the data is sent securely?
Effective security is essential for BlackBerry devices. The devices are used within many large financial organisations which are exchanging highly confidential material. BlackBerry security is therefore a multi-layered process.
The first stage is encryption:
The second stage is through the device:
Thinking about the explosion in the mobile phone market, increased convergence and the introduction of products such as the "iTunes phone", why has BlackBerry chosen to operate within the enterprise market rather than the potentially very lucrative consumer market?
There are two types of BlackBerry service currently available - the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution (BES) for corporate users and the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) for individual/small business. The BIS service is a non-enterprise offering and is targeted at the consumer market.
In this way BlackBerry has already entered the consumer market.
The service was launched two years and allows users to integrate their BlackBerry handheld through the BlackBerry Internet Service with up to 10 business or personal email accounts eg. Hotmail, Yahoo etc., using POP3/IMAP and/or mail forwarding.
Messages sent from the handheld can utilise the user's existing personal email address. Copies of messages sent to the user's existing personal email account(s) are pushed to the BlackBerry handheld.
With the BlackBerry Internet Service a new email address is provided with the BlackBerry handheld, so users can start sending and receiving email within minutes. The new email account is a personal and private Internet/web-based email address that stores all email messages.
In addition, we have has launched a range of handsets targeted at the consumer
market. The 7100 series deliver the power of BlackBerry in a sleek and stylish mobile phone design. Features
include a high-resolution colour screen, a speakerphone, Bluetooth support, Quad-band radio for international roaming, 32MB Flash memory, 4MB SRAM and polyphonic ringtone support. The
BlackBerry 7100 series also introduces RIM's new keyboard technology, SureType99, which converges a mobile phone keypad and a QWERTY keyboard to allow users to input text as easily as
numbers on a device the size of a traditional mobile phone. The 7100 series handsets are available from Vodafone, T-Mobile and 02.
For enterprise users, BlackBerry handhelds can be set up to integrate with enterprise email using BlackBerry Enterprise Server99 software that is installed behind the corporate firewall and supports seamless mailbox integration for users. This platform can support many users. A 'Small Business Edition' exists for 5 to 15 users.
BlackBerry Enterprise Server software integrates with Microsoftae Exchange, IBM Lotusae Domino99 and Novell Groupwise email environments and provides enterprise users and IT departments with a wide range of unique features and benefits, including secure 'push'-based access to corporate email and wider corporate data (through the Mobile Data Service feature of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and the browser on the handheld), wireless synchronisation, end-to-end Triple DES security, and centralised IT management and control.
What advantages can technologies such as 3G offer BlackBerry, and in turn offer your customers?
As technology matures, big investments are made which provide great opportunities for companies such as Research In Motion. 3G ultimately means that a greater amount of data can be transmitted down the pipelines. 3G probably won't make a big difference to mobile email because email does not require very much data space. However, the potential in terms of video streaming is vast. It is probable that video streaming will add a further chapter to the BlackBerry story.However, with any future developments, Research In Motion must ensure that its existing services are not compromised.
Research In Motion's focus is to provide a great customer experience - further applications and services must safeguard, as well as build upon Blackberry's core strengths.
In your opinion, what is the next step in mobile communications tools?
The future for mobile communication will lie in delivering different types of content to the consumer in an easy, efficient and cost effective way. Consumers know that they can download songs onto MP3 players so the challenge is to make the price and process compelling enough for consumers to download content onto their mobile phones instead of onto their MP3 players.Companies like Research In Motion will also be responding to changing social trends eg. people's demand for a better work-life balance, the demand for greater mobility and flexibility whilst at work etc. The trend will be to create a range of services and handsets which enable people to be more productive.
What technologies will businesses be depending on in five years time, and ten years time?
Most technologies are already in place. The next five and ten years will see the exploitation of these technologies to leverage the benefits businesses and consumers demand.Is the future of BlackBerry in hardware or software?
The future of Blackberry is in both hardware and software.BlackBerry handsets are iconic in their design and are extremely popular. However, Research In Motion is not a handset manufacturer: the strength of BlackBerry lies in its back end operations ie. In the fact that BlackBerry allows data to be transmitted across all cellular networks. On the back of this BlackBerry has launched a range of new initiatives which enable consumers to have a BlackBerry experience from a different handset.
The new licensing programmes have been called BlackBerry Built In and BlackBerry Connect. They enable mobile device manufacturers to integrate BlackBerry connectivity for both enterprises and individual users into their handsets.
Having said this, however it will be a long time before Research In Motion ceases to provide its handsets - new devices are constantly being launched targeted both at the enterprise and consumer market.
As long as the devices remain popular, Research In Motion will continue to make them.
Find out more about the BlackBerry at www.blackberry.com/uk. Also, take a look the itwales.com review of the BlackBerry 7100t .
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