SAP still favors Blackberry?

Last week I met with an guy from OpenText, which is now the largest Canadian technology company, just surpassing RIM this year in market share. He was using blackberry and he told me blackberry is still their first choice recommended by his company but lots of his colleagues have switched to iPhone or Android this year. He said it can hardly be imagined several year ago when all the employees of OpenText are enjoying Blackberry shipped from their Canadian neighbor. 

It is true that RIM is in its downside. This week RIM(Research In Motion) reports its third quarter fiscal 2012 results. Compared to Q2, the number is up 24% but is down 6% from same quarter last year. RIM's share drops to its lowest level in recent seven years.

Some blames arise pointing out the failure of playbook which distract RIM's focus on Blackberry phones. From my point of view, playbook is still in the team of potentially threating iPad.

It is easy to see that Playbook has much in common with iPad, same screen resolution, sandboxing operating system and app store. Because of these thing, Playbook is more secure and reliable to deploy into enterprise environment, not to say RIM has its own huge enterprise users. Some of my customers always complain about the different versions of Android devices and hardly any code can cater different screen resolutions. Open source makes community thriving but will be a disaster to enterprises. Same problems may happen to meego, and webos which is announced to be open-source by HP.

I think and I guess that is why SAP is still favoring Blackberry or Playbook. SAP has the most mobility demos running on iOS and Blackberry. Recently several additional Playbook demos are released internally focusing on different industry scenarios. I happen to have time installing the Playbook simulator and run out some screenshots for your digest. Playbook may not be ready now but is deserved to get visionary attentions.

RIM's Rhyme in mobile

Recently I meet with a customer who adopted Blackberry solutions years ago. They situated in southern China and are considering enhancing their mobility infrastructure because of the following reasons,

• Blackberry devices are considered not secure enough
• Not supporting different types of devices
• The customer needs a more open and mature platform for rapid enterprise application development and deployment instead of a single proprietory vendor solution
• Lack of applications and intuitive UI
• High risks of government regulation and banning (frequetly happen in China). Not to say it already happens in India and Britain this year.

That is the reason, when I see the news that RIM released Blackberry Fusion, at the first moment I googled into the product site. After scanning around several minutes, I catch up some key points which you can follow,

• Blackberry Fusion is coming in 2012, so it is not yet to release
• Blackberry Fusion is based on the acquired technology which runs on top of BES Server to support iOS and android, so the integration is uncertain
• Blackberry Balance(what a good name) technology enables seperation of personal and working data on blackberry devices. It fits quite well with BYOD(Bring your own device) trend.

RIM is struggling to keep its customers from losing confidence. RIM BES solution still works best in a pure blackberry-enabled enterprise, as it is also agreed by the customer I mentioned above. However, in this world which iPhone and Android dominate and will dominate in the near future, we need to see more on the endeavor of the Canadians.