Thursday, March 17, 2011

RIM (RIMM) offers Corporate Clients Data-Management Service

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. (NASDAQ:RIMM) said it is offering its business customers a choice to shift back-office management of email traffic and other BlackBerry services off-site, in a strategy that it says will save customers money, speed the rollout of BlackBerry services and enhance security at a time when more and more employees use smart phones for corporate and personal use.

The initiative comes as RIM readies the launch of its PlayBook tablet, a major product launch that will vault RIM into the tablet-computer market to compete against Apple Inc.'s iPad.

It also comes as RIM's corporate subscriber base faces an unprecedented attack from Apple's iPhone and iPad juggernauts, as well as a phalanx of smart phones that run on Google Inc.'s Android-operating system.

The move will be carried out in close conjunction with Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), which in October announced a major, so-called cloud-service initiative of its own, called Microsoft Office 365. As part of that initiative, companies that use Microsoft Exchange Server, which stores email, contact and calendar information, among other things, can move their Exchange servers to off-site data centers. The initiative is still in the testing phase but is expected to go live in a matter of months.

"We're embracing it in a big way, and we're going out jointly with Microsoft to all of our customers," said Jim Tobin, senior vice president of RIM's software and business services unit.




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