

RIM Customers Working On Contingency Plans - ilamont
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-09/rim-s-customers-working-on-contingency-plans-corporate-canada.html

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omh
Several years ago, Blackberry was the only way to get reasonably secure email
on remote devices. Lots of companies standardised on that, and have kept going
because it's the easy option and it still works.

It's been possible to get mail/calendar/etc on other devices for a while (and
even for devices owned by your employees rather than purchase by you). But if
your directors are all using Blackberries then it can be hard to justify the
migration cost, especially for small/medium companies or places that are
particularly conservative.

But when it looks like Blackberry might not be around for much longer, all
that changes. Articles like this are the sign of (another) tipping point for
RIM.

[ I'm a sysadmin at a small Blackberry-only company. Two managers sent me this
article today and asked what we were doing ]

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brohee
“Large enterprises don’t want to be locked in with a single vendor anymore,”
yet flocking to Apple...

It boggles the mind. Five years ago, RIMM was king of the hill.

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gmac
Though Apple don't provide a corporate mobile email service, so there isn't
the same kind of lock-in in this case, right?

~~~
brohee
No but Apple going out of business (what they fear of Blackberry, even if
unlikely short term) would hinder their ability to deploy software, which is
pretty bad too.

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ralfd
I would say Apple going out of business is unlikely long term! By the way: In-
house developed apps are not depending on Apples App store.

<http://www.apple.com/business/accelerator/>

~~~
joezydeco
But they _do_ depend on Apple's signing of the app before installation on the
phone, right?

~~~
danudey
For development, Apple signs a certificate that lets you sign your own
binaries, plus a provisioning profile that the phone uses to determine if it
can run the app.

Presumably for the corporate version, they just give you a certificate you can
use to sign, and one that you put on company phones so they're willing to run
your software.

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hunterjrj
Is Microsoft trying to capitalize on RIM's recent stumblings? It seems rather
obvious that they should be beating down the door of these enterprise
customers to push WP devices into the mix.

I'm hazarding a guess, but a great many enterprises must be running Exchange.
Vertical integration or what?

~~~
InclinedPlane
almost all enterprise companies use exchange. The thing is though that iphone
and android have supported exchange for a while, there really isn't much
reason to go to the windows phone just to get push email.

~~~
praxulus
Microsoft probably has the most experience with supporting enterprise
customers. Apple is largely consumer-oriented and Google is something else
entirely. They might match each other on features, but that's not all
businesses look for.

~~~
jaetldev
Could this be the perfect point for MS to convert existing RIM customers to
Windows phones? I understand what you're saying but from a business
perspective I was wondering if MS taking over RIM makes any sense at all

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mtgx
Can't they just use Gmail?

