RIM Dangles Carrot To Blackberry-Loving SMBs

Shiny new smartphones stole the show at last week's Mobile World Congress, but Research In Motion used the event to unveil a product that's grabbing the attention of small business solution providers.

RIM's new BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express is free software that wirelessly synchronizes Blackberry devices with Microsoft Exchange and Small Business Server. For RIM, which has long heard complaints that Blackberry Enterprise Server is too costly and complex for small businesses, this product shows a renewed resolve to target this market segment.

For the past couple of years, small business VARs have dealt with BES cost issues by offering customers the Blackberry Professional Server (BPS), a stripped down version of BES for organizations with up to 20 Blackberry users. BPS was free for the first license, and $100 for additional users, which made it ideal for organizations that couldn't afford a BES.

However, RIM hasn't shown much interest in developing BPS -- it's still only available on 4.x, which means it won't run on Windows Server 2008 and doesn't include 64 bit support. "BPS is virtually unknown to most users. RIM really hasn't' done much marketing for it," said Frank Ballatore, president and CEO of Ridgefield, Conn.-based New England Computer Group.

Marc Harrison, president of Silicon East, a Microsoft solution provider in Manalapan, N.J., says RIM has recently begun providing BES to small business customers who couldn't use BPS, so giving away BES for small business was just a small jump from that. "Microsoft already gives away Outlook Mobile Access [the server side of ActiveSync] as part of Exchange, so RIM was just playing catch-up here," he said.

In fact, BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express is good news for Microsoft because it'll remove a longstanding barrier to Small Business Server 2008 adoption, according to Susan Bradley, a Small Business Specialist partner in Fresno, Calif. "This is big for SBS 2008 because up until now the BES service wouldn't load on SBS 2008, it was only supported on 32 bit operating systems," said Bradley.

"If you had a customer planning an upgrade to SBS 2008 and they were married to their Blackberries, you had to figure out a way to stand up/license a Windows Server 2003 box somewhere in that network," Bradley added.

One of the more important aspects of BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express is that it only requires a Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) activation, as opposed to a more expensive BES activation. David Bean, president of eAccess Solutions, Palatine, Ill., expects this to save his small business customers thousands of dollars per year in airtime costs.

"This is going to allow our customers to deploy more BlackBerry handsets in their business, and in areas that they previously hadn't thought of," Bean said. "This will, in turn, help them save money by increasing productivity."

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