Mobile Fusion From RIM Might Save Company

RIM may have just pulled a rabbit out of the hat to save themselves.

So much of the news regarding RIM has been down right bad and the future for the company was looking very bleak. Their decision to focus on the Enterprise business first and then the consumer business has been seen as the exact opposite of what they should be doing. Smart phones have been a consumer driven business for the past few years and where the money is at. Apple has proven that beyond even their best expectation. With all changes at RIM and the really bad quarterly report, it really did look like it was too late for them to turn things around.

That is until today. RIM has come out with something which can be considered bold and it is called Mobile Fusion. This is something they have been working on for a long time and have done an outstanding job of keeping things secret about it until they were ready to roll it out. This single product which is for their Enterprise clients let's IT departments manage Blackberry devices. But it is so much more than that.

This lets IT departments manage phones which employees have selected to use at work. This means they can control Apple iPhone's and the wide selection of Android phones which are out there. All of this from a single program and not multiple programs to be maintained. This is big news for the corporate world. There are options for the pricing on this of either $99 per user or $4 per month per user. This provides further potential business for RIM and there is integration with Mobile Fusion and Blackberry Enterprise Servers which is a critical feature. All of this fits nicely around security which is a key concern for the Enterprise business that RIM is committed to supporting.

"For businesses and government, managing a mix of mobile devices on any scale is chaotic," Alan Panezic, vice president of enterprise product management and marketing at RIM, said in a statement. "BlackBerry Mobile Fusion allows organizations to manage a mixed environment of devices in the most secure, simple, and cost efficient manner possible. It also means that businesses and government do not have to move to the lowest common denominator on security for all the devices they need to manage."

Blackberry Balance In a product talked about last year, the Blackberry Balance for their smart phones fits in nicely with the new model of letting employees have their own phones with a business side to them. The Blackberry Balance set up allows personal and business communications to be isolate from each other and if necessary, the business side of the phone to be wiped by IT personnel remotely. This protects the company and allows employees to use their phones for personal use. That is common place in business, but few smart phones have the ability to isolate each side so securely.

This one would have been great to release in the fall of last year and could have potentially held on to the value of the company. We can assume that it was not ready for full release until today and this information is going to be talked about for a few weeks to gauge the impact to the market. It would appear that this looks like it is the exact thing that RIM needed to do for integration of various mobile devices to operate under the security umbrella in corporations. We can expect to see them improving this as the tablet market continues to grow.

It looks like RIM may have just snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

You can read information from the Blackberry Business Blog.