Part 1: The Speech

A “missed opportunity” is the best way to describe the keynote speech by RIM president Mike Lazaridis, opening the first full day of RIM’s annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium.

It was preceded by a short corporate video, featuring Lazaridis sitting before a whiteboard covered with scientific equations. It was the standard fare: the executive, obviously responding to questions and comments, holding forth on various topics. Against all odds, and all expectations, it was better than Lazaridis’ in-person speech.

In the video, Lazardis seems to be quiet, intense, focused, and, to use a word being used far too often at WES “passionate.” Passionate in a quite, intense, focused kind of way. But at least he seemed to be talking about stuff that actually mattered to him.

A few of his video comments had the ring of truth. “The function of the product was everything,” he said of the early BlackBerry introductions. That came out with an almost steely conviction, and my bet is that those seven words form a big part of RIM’s corporate DNA.

Another video comment was “We sweated the details.” This is a cliché, but all clichés have a kernel of truth, and again Lazaridis’ words suggested that for RIM this is an indivisible and irreducible kernel.

By contrast, the keynote itself was simply flat. There was little sense of Lazaridis the man, either as an engineer or as co-CEO of a smartphone and mobile communications company that seems to be going from strength to strength. It was, as one user, said to me, an advertising speech.

The tone came across, to me at least, as self-congratulatory, not toward Lazaridis personally but toward RIM as a company. Exactly the opposite of what a keynote should be to 5,000 enterprise professionals charged with keeping their corporate BlackBerry systems alive and healthy.

RIM’s success is undeniable. But it’s reached these heights because thousands of companies have entrusted to RIM this most essential and emblematic of 21st century communications mediums.

Part 2: The BlackBerry software universe – Neverfail

Check out this British-based company at www.neverfailgroup.com, with its biggest office in terms of sales in Austin, Texas. As the name suggests, its about making sure key parts of your software infrastructure never fail.

Get this: 16 months ago, protecting enterprise BlackBerry deployments with this continuous availability software was 3-4% of Neverfail’s business. Today, it’s 34%, and doubling every quarter.

When founded about 15 years ago, the company was focused on redundancy and disaster recovery consulting. About five years ago they began creating a high-availability software application, drawing on engineering expertise grown at Tandem and the late Digital Equipment Corp.

The application creates a clone of the target software, such as Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, even VMware virtual server, or in this case BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and then keeps it updated in real time with any changes. It’s constantly checking that the primary server is healthy and available. When that changes, the backup Neverfail clone (located alongside or on the farside of moon) takes over, a process that occurs in about 90 seconds, according to executives.

The software doesn’t protect just the BES: companion products protects the other elements that constitute a corporate BlackBerry infrastructure, such as Exchange Server (or Lotus Domino), Microsoft SQL Server.

British cell carrier Vodafone bought Neverfail to protect its own internal BlackBerry deployment, then liked it so much that in February 2008 they turned it into a business: It uses Neverfail as the software core of a new continuous availability and disaster recover service focused on enterprise BlackBerry deployments.

Today at WES, one Neverfail customer, British American Tobacco, will be named one of RIM’s Wireless Leadership Award winners, in part for using Neverfail as one element in creating a mission-critical enterprise mobility infrastructure around the BlackBerry.