RIM announces BlackBerry Mobile Fusion

By George Wong on 11/29/2011, filed in Home > CellPhones

RIM has just announced the launch of BlackBerry Mobile Fusion – a tool for corporate customers who want to link their Android and iOS phones to the BlackBerry network without compromising security. This occasion also marks the first time RIM has ever offered its network services to non-BlackBerry devices. With RIM losing the market share when it comes to smartphones, it looks like the company has to find other ways to protect its core business: BlackBerry Services subscriptions. By embracing other platforms, RIM can hope to stay relevant in the enterprise sector even though its BlackBerry smartphones are being used by less people.

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion will turn iOS and Android phones into enterprise-friendly devices that can be safe and secure enough to be used in a corporate environment. It will provide highly scalable management capabilities like asset management, configuration management, security and policy definition and management, security and protection for lost or stolen devices (remote lock, wipe), user and group-based administration, multiple device per user capabilities, app and software management, connectivity management (WiFi, VPN, certificates), and a centralized console.

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion is currently in early beta testing, with a closed beta program scheduled for January 2012 and an expected release date in late March. Great news for those of you who don’t want to carry company BlackBerry devices around and prefer to use your own phones instead. I wonder if this means we’ll be start seeing services like BBM brought over to other platforms.

[Press Release]

Android: Android is the mobile operating system from Google. The software was originally built by a company called Android Inc, that was purchased by Google in 2005. From its modest debuts, Android has become a powerhouse that powers not only smartphones and tablet, but a host of other less high-profile devices and gadgets. Although Android is not a community-driven project, Google does release the source code as open-source under the Apache license. You can follow Ubergizmo on Android with Google Currents.

iOS: was once upon a time called iPhone OS, or "operating system", which is the software that provides all the basic device functionality and is the interface between the hardware and applications. iOS was introduced with the iPhone on January 9 2007, and it was originally not intended to be programmable by third parties. Steve Jobs had envisioned that developers could create Web Apps that would run in the browser. This changed less than one year after when the iPhone SDK (software development kit) was introduced in October 2007. Today, hundreds of thousands of apps have been created for this platform. iPhone OS became iOS on June 2010. Interestingly, both iPhone and iOS were former trademarks of Cisco, that Apple now uses under a license.

RIM: RIM is the acronym for Research In Motion, the Canadian company behind the BlackBerry brand. RIM was founded in the mid 90s by Mike Lazaridis and with Jim Balsillie and went IPO (Initial Public Offering) in 1998. Its claim to fame was to make mobile email really effective and enterprises quickly adopted its devices and associated software and services which were highly lucrative. With the rise of iOS and Android devices, the BlackBerry franchise bumped into trouble and its decline prompted RIM to take a radical step by overhauling its BlackBerry operating system (OS) completely with QNX. The first version of the QNX BlackBerry OS is BlackBerry 10 or BB10.

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