RIM pushes benefits of BES 5.0 release

BES 5.0 adds new capabilites to BlackBerry handsets

Research In Motion (RIM) pioneered push email with its BlackBerry products, but now faces a host of rivals seeking to grab a slice of the mobility market. With the latest release of its server platform for large organisations, the company claims to be untroubled by rivals, and confident that customers will see the benefits of upgrading, even during the current economic downturn.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) 5.0, unveiled earlier this month, adds a number of enhancements including a more user-friendly administrator console, built-in failover capabilities, and improved facilities to ease over-the-air deployment of applications to end users.

According to Alan Panezic, RIM's vice president of platform product management, the market for mobility is growing despite the economic downturn. He cited findings from Forrester Research that the majority of firms expect to increase spending on this area by 5 percent or more this year.

"Smartphones are like desktop computers all over again," he said, explaining that the devices were becoming an essential part of enterprise IT as they became more capable, as happened with PCs in the past.

On the subject of customer upgrades, Panezic said that BES 5.0 addresses three key themes based on customer feedback: manageability, high availability and application management.

Manageability is addressed by the new BlackBerry Administration Service, which provides a completely browser-based console for managing the BlackBerry infrastructure.

The console allows administrators to place BlackBerry users into groups with different settings, such as the applications they have access to. Users can belong to multiple groups, and groups can also be nested inside other groups.

BES 5.0 also has simplified deployment of applications out to end user handsets. According to Panezic, applications can be automatically delivered over-the-air, based on the user's profile. If the user is a member of the sales department, for example, then they will automatically get the set of applications defined for that group.

"You just need to set it up once, and applications are then deployed and removed automatically as users move between groups," Panezic said.

High availability is the third key enhancement in BES 5.0. Firms can now set up a second server that mirrors the first and is ready to step in if it fails or if some service threshold level is crossed. Organisations do not require an additional licence for the standby server, Panezic said, effectively giving customers high availability for free.

End users also see some benefits from the new platform on their BlackBerry handset. One enhancement is support for flags, allowing users to mark an email to follow up later, for example.

Users can also now access network file shares through the Remote File Explorer tool, enabling them to pull down documents from their corporate LAN for access on their BlackBerry.

When asked whether RIM felt threatened by rivals in the enterprise mobility space, such as Microsoft with push email support integrated into recent versions of Exchange, Panezic was adamant that only the BlackBerry could fully meet enterprise requirements.

"There are lots of would-be competitors, but none touches us for completeness, for how much control we give to the IT department. We really don’t see anyone offering a significant percentage of the capabilities we offer to the enterprise," he said.

In particular, rivals mostly focus on push email and claim "this is what BlackBerry is about, and we can do it too", explained Panezic. "But what we hear from customers is that they want more; they want PBX integration, access to enterprise applications, and other capabilities," he added.

Panezic also claimed that many rivals do not even implement push email fully in the same way that BlackBerry does.

"Push means better battery life on the handset. It isn't constantly polling the server asking 'have you got anything for me?', and that means it isn't drawing as much power," he explained. This is important for mobile workers that might be out of the office much of the time and may have to wait for an opportunity to recharge their handset.

On the question of upgrading, Panezic claimed that BES 5.0 has key new capabilities that will ultimately save costs for customers.

"The new admin console is web-based, which makes it cheaper to maintain, and building in high availability support is a huge cost saver," he said.

Many organisations have already invested in third-party solutions to provide failover protection for their BlackBerry infrastructure, so RIM "felt it was incumbent on us to offer some kind of support in this area", Panezic explained.

In addition, the ability to access network file shares from a BlackBerry means that organisations might not need to equip as many staff with laptops in future, he added.

Panezic also said the new BES 5.0 has been designed to be "the easiest and most pain-free upgrade ever", as administrators can bring up a new server inside a virtual machine and gradually migrate users over from the old server.

One customer willing to endorse RIM's claims was Tayside Fire and Rescue service, which was a pre-release trial partner for BES 5.0.

ICT Manager Gary Bellfield said that high availability support was one reason the service decided to deploy BES 5.0.

"We're obviously a 24-hour service, and we need to ensure at least two layers of fallback in all our systems," he explained.

Bellfield said deployment had been "one of the easiest upgrades ever, we had very few issues".

The BlackBerry push technology had been one of the key reasons for choosing RIM, according to Bellfield.

"We looked at different platforms, but no other has met our requirements, including the battery life of the device," he said.

In the near future, the Fire and Rescue service also plans to make use of the GPS and presence capabilities in newer BlackBerry handsets to provide better information on the availability of personnel to the command and control centre, Bellfield added.