Research In Motion (RIM) made headlines last week by default when Visto acquired the former Good Technology, a RIM competitor, from Motorola. The move spurred talk that Visto is taking on RIM's BlackBerry e-mail push-service empire. Meanwhile, however, for the scores of RIM shops content to continue growing their BlackBerry user populations, automated tools quietly emerged to help them contain costs.

BoxTone introduced a new version of its management, monitoring and reporting software for BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES) to help enterprises drive down per-user costs. With its BoxTone for BlackBerry v.4 software, the company is attempting to bottle BlackBerry administrative expertise and use it to automate enterprise wireless help desks. If end users themselves and level 1 helpdesk personnel can clear up nearly all issues, that keeps the cost of BlackBerry administration and management at bay, explains Brian Reed, BoxTone VP of products.

This should work in two ways. First, the software is intended to avoid escalating support to higher-paid help desk professionals. Second, since RIM BlackBerry’s whole value proposition is about adding a few minutes here and there to employee productivity, faster trouble resolution theoretically keeps users more productive and yields a bigger ROI.

Perhaps most interesting is BoxTone’s “1-Click Fix-It” enhancement for quickly fixing well-known issues. BoxTone has discerned, for example, that when BlackBerry users can receive mail but cannot send it, the problem is nearly always with their BlackBerry service books – software that contains configuration information about how the BlackBerry device interacts with the BES and what specific services it supports.

So support staff can click one button that resends the service books to the user, which should automatically solve user problems in 95% of cases, says Reed.

He estimates that shops with 1,000 BlackBerry devices can squeeze $220,000 to $300,000 per year out of their support costs with the automated features, which also include expense management and alerts that continually recommend network tuning for improving performance and uptime.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.