Smart's phone
Between Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, and the new Microsoft Windows smart-phones, Blackberry certainly understands that market domination may be nothing short of a historical footnote. As of December 2009, RIM maintained a large share of the smartphone market. With competition coming from some very large names, Blackberry had to strike both hard and fast. First strike? The wallet.
Blackberry Enterprise Server Express Edition
RIM recently introduced a free version of the “popular” Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) software — the Express Edition. Additionally, RIM promises that there will be no additional user license fees for using this software. In the past, after spending $3k on the Blackberry server software, you would then purchase client usage licenses at $55 – $100 per license (depending on how many you bought). These costs added consideration for many people to avoid the Blackberry system whatsoever. Although an enterprise may not hesitate to spend more than $25k on user licenses, a small to medium sized business would much rather use a smart-phone with imap capabilities than worry about such an expensive integration.
“BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express is also free: the software requires no additional user license fees, and works with any Internet-enabled or enterprise data plan.” — Blackberry’s Blog
Enter the iPhone and Android
With smart-phones becoming more accessible (thank you Apple and Google), the pay-per-license usage would have essentially prohibited Blackberry from competing in a small business world. Let’s take for example a “larger” small business with let’s say 500 users. At $55 per license, and $3k for the software, integrating the Blackberry enterprise software would cost almost $30k — and this does not include the other costs for the actual email and calendaring software (such as Microsoft exchange).
With iPhone/Android/etc. and an imap capable email solution, this additional cost becomes $0. Open source calendar solutions are not nearly as “user-friendly” as exchange, but they get the job done. Not to mention low cost alternatives, such as Google’s enterprise calendar. Add all of these factors together, and RIM faced extreme competition.
Let’s Not Forget the Phone
Software aside, RIM needs some quick innovation of their actual phones if they wish to remain competitive. The reason people like the iphone and android directly relates to the phone itself. Everything from browsing the web to using email has been engineered to be a “better user experience.” RIM’s first array into a “better” smart phone was the Storm. And, well, the feedback has not been anything on level of the iphone or android.
For more information on the Blackberry Enterprise Server Express software, check out:
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I believe that this article misses much of the point of the current smart phone competition. This article declares imap the only available alternative to a blackberry enterprise server. This is not the nature of the current playing field. The reason RIM would be willing to give away an enterprise server is because many (most) of the other players in the market support Microsoft’s Exchange Active Sync. This protocol allows every phone from iphones to windows mobile (but not blackberrys) to sync with an Exchange server. This gives all of the benefit of a BES, but with no additional licensing, additional servers, or CAL’s. This (and not imap) is the threat to RIM’s market. Many IT Depts. (like mine) are pushing for using EAS instead of BES for cost and complexity reasons. Let me emphasize again though, that imap was never a consideration (and is not for most organizations), as it really offers very little of what BES or Active Sync do (i.e. no calendar sync, no push mail, no contact sync, etc.)