Research in Motion offers enterprise customers one month's free technical support

Research In Motion (RIM) has announced it is to offer business customers one month's free technical support as it continues to try to make amends for last week's service outage.

The firm, which has already offered users free downloads of premium applications worth around $100, said today that enterprise customers can now either apply for one month's free support, or have their existing contracts extended by one month.

RIM's UK managing director, Stephen Bates, told V3 that the move was part of the firm's ongoing apology to customers as it works to uncover the cause of the network failure.

"We have been talking with customers since the outage began and the number one issue for them is to ensure the service issues have been resolved and we are now very comfortable that services are back and fully operational," he said.

"We are now carrying out a full audit of our software systems alongside the root cause analysis of the network to ensure an incident of this nature does not happen again."

He added said it was too early to confirm exactly what had caused the outage as it is only just starting its investigations, but he confirmed the firm is liaising with its network hardware partners to help establish the cause.

Bates also explained that the range of applications the firm is making available for free is based on the most popular downloads from its App World store and more may be offered in the near future.

The incident affected millions of BlackBerry users across the globe, with a number of customers confirming to V3 that they had been affected.

RIM, though, was unable to establish during the incident exactly which services where being affected and why.

"The nature of intermittent faults is that it's very hard to say exactly who has been affected so we saw some customers reporting lots of problems and others with none at all," he said.

The incident was a major embarrassment for RIM, which has always prided itself on the security and reliability of its services, at a time when its market share is being eroded by Apple and Google's Android platform.