RIM Loses Another Product Manager

And another one bites the dust. More troubles arise as RIM loses yet another key team member. Alex Ivanovic lead product manager for BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365 has officially left the team. Alex spearheaded integrating BES with Office 365. According to reports Alex apepars to be quite happy with his new job working for nulayer, a company that specialized in developing apps for iPhones and iPads. As more and more personnel continue to part ways with RIM it leaves us wondering whats really going on inside RIM.

What are your thoughts on the frequent departure of RIM personnel? Let us know in the Comments Below and might just talk about it in our news cast.

Cloud Services – Interview With Alec Taylor (VIDEO)

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The BizBlog has posted an exclusive interview with Alec Taylor, Vice President of Product Marketing at RIM which took place at BlackBerry World back in May. The interview focuses on the new BlackBerry Cloud service.

…discusses how businesses are beginning to shift towards cloud services. He discusses overall insights into this trend, as well as specific details surrounding BlackBerry® solutions which offer access to the new Microsoft® Office® 365 cloud-based opportunities.

via BizBlog

via:bbempire

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services Detailed by RIM in Latest Doc

One of our sources let us know that RIM has put up a document highlights their BlackBerry Business Cloud Services features and technical details. This is the most information I have seen come out of RIM about their new service that essentially offers a free hosted BES for companies that use Microsoft Office 365 hosting. From what I can see this is a pretty impressive feature set and I can see companies using it for a quick Exchange + BES rollout.

Check out the details in this PDF from RIM. (Direct link to PDF)

via:bbr

5 Products That Would Be Awesome If Branded BlackBerry

Cool CTV video showing some of the ways QNX can be used other than PlayBook.

You really get the feeling a new age is dawning with RIM. With the acquisitions of QNX, TAT and Torch Mobile, there’s a lot of potential on the horizon. Also, consumers are demanding a lot more than just smartphones and RIM’s first foray into the tablet market shows its willingness to enter relatively new markets. Companies like Apple and Google are well diversified in the products they offer, and RIM still seems like a bit of a one trick pony. But if RIM were to enter more markets with the BlackBerry brand, here are 5 we would love to see:

RIM Preps Cloud Services, Considers Managing Non-BlackBerry Devices

Although it likes its current business of selling BlackBerry devices and the servers that businesses need to manage them, Research In Motion is open to some other alternatives.

In particular, the company is already working to re-architect its core BlackBerry Enterprise Server product so that it can also be offered as a cloud-based service, to be hosted by either partners or RIM itself.

“We will be launching a cloud service,” RIM Vice President Pete Devenyi told Mobilized in an interview following a Boston event focused on RIM’s 2011 enterprise strategy.

However, Devenyi said the service offered by RIM directly won’t cover as many types of email servers as its software is capable of supporting, leaving room for partners.

“We’re not going to launch a cloud service for everything, for every combination,” he said. “There are going to be mail servers out there that we don’t connect with through our cloud service. There will be other partners that choose to connect to other mail server providers and they may offer a hosted service on their own.”

Partners could even offer a combination of both mail server and cloud-based mobile device management. The company didn’t say when any of the cloud services might launch.

Another area that the company is exploring is whether to expand its software to manage mobile devices from other makers.

“BlackBerry is and will continue to be dominant in most corporations,” Devenyi said. “It’s not going to be the only device, given the fact that consumers have the choice to bring in their own devices, and IT departments are often letting them in. So there’s a question there. Do those corporations have to manage those devices differently or is there the possibility that RIM might extend capabilities to make it easier for those corporations to manage those devices as well.”

That business would not be entirely new. The company started a program years ago called BlackBerry Connect that allowed businesses to use their BlackBerry servers to manage certain devices when those devices communicated using BlackBerry protocols. However, the new venture, if RIM decided to go ahead, would expand that to managing devices that use their own methods.

“In this case, it would have to be done differently because it would be more native,” he said. “It wouldn’t use BlackBerry protocols to manage those devices, but conceptually yes, we did that with BlackBerry Connect.”

Devenyi stressed that although the company is talking about the possibilities in this area, it has nothing to announce.

“It is not something that we would say is never going to happen,” he said. “If enough of our customers really want us to do it, we know that BlackBerry management is far and away the best management console in the world, and if the right thing to do is to extend a subset of those capabilities to be able to manage other devices, it’s worthy of a conversation.”