When push email comes to shove
Published: 26 Jun 2007 12:15 BST
...there is still plenty of room for the company — and its rivals — to grow. In fact, she believes that rivalry is "good for the industry" because it is still a young and immature one and increased activity brings "awareness, education and marketing dollars" to the space.
In relation to the danger posed by Microsoft, meanwhile, Eggberry dismissed it as only one of three key players in the email market, along with Novell and IBM Lotus. And, she said, RIM has co-opted all of them by enabling the BlackBerry to work alongside their platforms — and every other important environment out there, ranging from Google to Yahoo. It has also just announced a virtual BlackBerry environment, due for release this autumn, that will enable users to run BlackBerry applications on some Windows Mobile 6 devices.
Nonetheless, it is the middleware layer of the mobile proposition, in the form of Exchange, that Microsoft appears to be desirous of controlling, rather than going after dominance of the client operating system element, in the shape of Mobile 6. This means that, should organisations decide to rationalise their email platforms, RIM could become vulnerable, as Exchange now has such functionality built in and can be accessed by a range of different mobile devices.
But, said Eggberry: "The competition didn't just arrive yesterday. It's been around since we got started in the market and it's not just about Microsoft Exchange. There are two other strong, dominant players and we're continuing to grow on all three platforms."
In addition, the company is in a strong position, she said, because it has about 270 mobile operators from 100 countries "lined up to sell BlackBerrys, based on customer demand".
RIM's BlackBerry Connect software licensing programme has led it to sign up 50 handset providers, including Nokia and Siemens, to enable consumers to access its back-end services using the device of their choice. And the vendor's BlackBerry Beyond Email initiative has seen it partnering with a range of independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators to both support the platform and develop specific offerings based around it.
While Eggberry acknowledges that software and services still only account for about 30 percent of RIM's business, this, she said, is "because the hardware is the most expensive element". Nonetheless, she added that "we are very clearly focused on all three areas", and she sees them all as equally important in contributing to the company's growth.
But Enderle is not convinced that this will be enough. He accused RIM of holding its customers hostage during the patent dispute with NTP, by indicating that they "would be cut off if they lost the case, in effect putting their customers between themselves and the outcome". This failure to negotiate a settlement to protect US customers, he said, made them "very nervous with the company, potentially opening up its installed base to competing offerings".
Enderle is also unhappy with how the vendor dealt with a recent outage in the US. "They didn't even admit there was one until late. Partners like AT&T, which were getting massive numbers of trouble calls, were the first to point to RIM. As an enterprise vendor, if you have a problem, you have to take responsibility for it, communicate an estimate of length of outage and any workaround," he said.
This is particularly important because many of RIM's users work in government, law enforcement, healthcare and as lawyers — "groups that don't like to be disconnected and uninformed".
As a result, this suggests to him that the company's behaviour "is not consistent with an acceptable enterprise vendor. They need to be much more customer-centric and too often they are forgetting that they work for the customer and not the other way round".
To make matters worse, Enderle said, the company is "too small to sustain this fight against a large number of large players". This means that it will either need to "grow very quickly to compete effectively long-term" or, as is more likely, become an acquisition target.
But Eggberry disagrees strongly. "In the patent case, we did everything we could to protect our customers and the situation didn't affect EMEA. We listen to our customers at every move and that's made us relentless in protecting them, which is why we went through what we did. People understood our actions at the time and the whole scenario couldn't have affected us because we've continued to grow dramatically."
While she was unhappy with the subsequent outage incident, nonetheless she said that the vendor takes such issues "incredibly seriously" and resolved the matter by the following morning after "going out and communicating with customers and investigating what went wrong".
As for what the future holds, Eggberry believes that RIM still has all to play for and is building up a robust business that will carry it into the future. "To maintain our leadership position, we've got a relentless focus on innovation and listening and talking to customers to find out what they want. We're experiencing hockey-stick growth, but it's just beginning and there are enormous market opportunities for us," she concluded.
Previous
- Thinking out of the inbox
- What businesses really think of mobile email
- When push email comes to shove
- Vendorboard: Must-haves for mobile email
- Buyer's Guide: smartphones for business
- Research shows push email on the rise
- Research: Key trends in mobile push email
- Video: How companies use push email
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