RIM delivers BES 10 ahead of BlackBerry 10 launch

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) has begun shipping the BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES 10) software, designed to support its upcoming BlackBerry 10 smartphones in a corporate environment.

Available for enterprise customers to download now, BES 10 builds on the email and management capabilities of earlier BES releases.

It adds support for the hotly anticipated BlackBerry 10 smartphones coming at the end of this month, but also RIM's PlayBook tablets, Android devices, plus Apple's iPhone and iPad iOS products.

"It's the evolution of BES," Peter Devenyi, RIM's senior vice president of Enterprise Software told V3.

"We're building on a decade of expertise in developing what we believe is the world's most secure mobile device management and mobile application management platform on the planet."

BES 10 is a crucial product for RIM, as it has to keep faith with existing customers still using older BlackBerry OS 5, 6 and 7 smartphones, while giving them an incentive to invest in the new BlackBerry 10 devices.

RIM has also had to recognise that organisations need tools to manage the influx of consumer-grade devices through the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, and so BES 10 promises to deliver all this through a single console.

"We've been working for months with customers large, small and medium-sized on BlackBerry 10 and BES 10, and the feedback has been remarkably positive, giving us the confidence that our customers are eager to deploy into their production environments," Devenyi said.

A key capability of BES 10 is back-end support for BlackBerry Balance, a feature of RIM's BlackBerry 10 devices that partitions each one into a separate ‘work' and ‘personal' environment, with the former under the control of the IT department.