May 04, 2012, 7:43 AM — Research in Motion executives and managers practiced staying "on message" at BlackBerry World this week, repeating a series of mantras about the company's directions and product plans. Yet the simple message is running into the hard practicalities of enterprise IT customers, and they want details and nuance.
Sometimes both were in short supply at RIM's annual customer conference in Orlando. RIM is in the midst of a life-or-death transition, moving to a new operating system, building support for it from application vendors and software developers, and crafting the next generation of smartphones and tablets due out later this year. RIM's creating plans and products at a rapid pace for both consumer and enterprise markets.
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But RIM's enterprise customers are incredibly diverse. Some are stable for even fast-growing BlackBerry shops. Some use the phones only for email and voice calls, others with only minimal app downloads. Nearly all of them are at different stages of struggling with how to deal with employees at all levels who bring non-BlackBerry devices to work and want to access email at least and sometimes more, often to the detriment of RIM. Surprisingly, few of those interviewed are closely following BlackBerry 10, the next generation mobile operating system highlighted at BlackBerry World.
Cereal company MOMbrands, until recently known as Malt-O-Meal, has about 500 BlackBerry users, but few of them seem really satisfied with their smartphones, according to a pair of technical support analysts at BlackBerry World. "Most of our users are not BlackBerry fans," says Tim Wood. "They want the iPhone."
Colleague David Aman says he walks through the company and often sees a user's BlackBerry lying on the desk, "and another [brand of] phone right next to it. It's silly." Some of the dissatisfaction is caused by a raft of small and not so small annoyances, ranging from podcasts being stopped when a call comes in and never resuming, to frustratingly poor battery performance.
Top executives now want iPads and iPhones, many of which are being informally "tested" by these senior managers who bring them to work and then want support. Aman says that IT is considering adopting a "bring your own device" regime as a way of simplifying mobile confusion and IT's responsibilities.
Yet at South African-based Sansol, a global chemicals manufacturer, the mobile policy bans personal devices in favor of corporate-issued BlackBerry smartphones. At Sansol North America, headquartered in Houston, systems administrator Tray Gonzalez has about 2,000 BlackBerry users in various regions, with 500 in the U.S. The number has been increasing and field sales staff are now testing a few BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.
"We haven't allowed BYOD, but so many people are requesting it, that we're looking into it," Gonzalez says. One concern is that a change in policy would lead to an unmanageable explosion of iOS and Android devices.
Gonzalez says he's impressed with RIM's recent release of the BlackBerry Device Service, an application for managing PlayBooks and all future BlackBerry 10 devices, and Universal Device Service, for managing iOS and Android devices, under the umbrella product name of BlackBerry Mobile Fusion. The classic BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) is needed for managing existing handsets running the traditional BlackBerry OS. A Web portal, called Mobile Fusion Studio, lets an administrator see the three separate device groups in a unified view.
Gonzalez plans to download the free, 60-day trial version of the Device Service and test it out. "I think it's great," he says.
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