The annual “BlackBerry Lovefest” (formally known as RIM’s Wireless Enterprise Symposium or “WES”) draws to a close today in Orlando Florida. If the movement in RIMM stock price this week is any indicator, it was a very successful show for RIM.
Having now attended all six WES events, I’d say this year had an especially unique blend of old and new faces with many of the veteran BlackBerry Alliance Partners opting to send smaller teams and, in many cases, not exhibiting on the showcase floor. With overflowing enthusiasm, the new kids on the block sent large teams to explain to the BlackBerry faithful how their new product or service is a little bit better than the competitor across the floor.
RIM filled up any idle booth space advertising their new “Top Shelf” professional services, training and accessory offerings. These offerings have been years in the coming and will effectively serve the largest customers in North America. These teams are intentionally lean to keep overhead down with the tradeoff being scalability.
The prevailing theme at WES was “BlackBerry is not just for business anymore…it is an integral part of your personal life.” Based on the number of people walking around the show at all hours of the day and night frozen in the "BlackBerry Prayer" stance, I would have to agree.
I was very encouraged that the other prevalent theme was “wireless applications.” This was true among RIM, the carriers and customers alike. Even Jim Belushi at the evening party used the term 2 or 3 times during his performance as did the Robin Wilson (lead singer of the Gin Blossoms) during the AT&T Wireless Party at the House of Blues.
New BlackBerry Smartphones
This consumer focused impression perfectly introduced the BlackBerry 8300 or “Curve”. This sexy little number morphs the QWERTY keyboard with many of the features that made the Pearl such a winner. The Curve gets an upgraded 2 Megapixel camera, a stereo headset jack, stereo Bluetooth A2DP capability and spell checker. To round out the multimedia offering, more formats will be supported (i.e. WMA files) and Roxio for BlackBerry will be provided on the desktop to manage all the pix, movies & music files.
The other exciting smartphone announcement was the BlackBerry 8830 for US based Verizon Wireless and Sprint. This little beauty will be the first of its kind offering seamless international roaming on GSM/GPRS while connecting via the CDMA/1x/EVDO antenna when in the US.
BlackBerry Software Roadmap
As a natural evolution, RIM continues to enhance the handheld and server side software marginalizing the ISV Alliance Partner offerings. Many thrifty ISVs were whispering among their colleagues as RIM announce their future intension to bake-in monitoring, roles based security, .Net and Eclipse snap-in for developers and a number of other features under partner NDA.
After years of trying to downplay the need for the Desktop Manager, it is BACK! It will become the mechanism to manage multimedia files on the BlackBerry family of smartphones.
ISV Partner Products and Services
There were few products and services that I would categorize as new or revolutionary. Many things that one would naturally expect to be built were now being demoed. There were RSS readers, geo positioning & emergency contacts and the like. Most were varying twists on one of the following themes: CRM, Dispatch, Geo-tracking / mapping / directions, business process improvement, content / document management, voice recognition, IT admin tools (monitoring / remote control / security / failover), software "middleware" platforms and 31 flavors of professional and hosted services.
I saw many strong and valuable products for customers to solve unique problems. Of the products that I reviewed, I found the following to be most memorable.
GPS Snitch offers BlackBerry client for 8800 (or GPS puck) that reports back via the cellular data network the precise location of the device. Projecting forward, the service could be used not only for monitoring, but also for social networking purposes. eTrace is an on-demand enterprise dispatch service based on the same technology. Both products can monitor and alert users if a driver is speeding or not where they should be.
Chalk Mobile’s Content Management Solution showed very well. From a BlackBerry 8800, Chalk showed a technician’s training demo complete with audio and video (stored on MicroSD not streaming) with step by step instructions and a test at the end of each section. The results were tracked back at the server. The Chalk demo was the best produced at the show.
REGARD’s R-Approval v3.0 product which enables traveling managers to receive approval requests for timecards, expense reports, purchase requisition and the like into a unique approval inbox received a lot of interests from tier 2 US carriers and tier 1 international carriers. The goal of this carrier class is to find sticky solutions that are easy to install, support and deliver high utility out-of-the-box.
WES Summary
Year after year RIM continues to produce a high quality show that continues to grow among the customers, partners and carriers internationally. The momentum of the Eco-System they have built is very compelling and should be for some time to come.
I remember the first meeting I took with RIM in 1998 they told me they felt they had an 18 month lead on their nearest competition. I believe they continue to extend that lead as they push into more international markets.
