Part 1: The BlackBerry as your infrastructure for fixed-mobile convergence?
This caught me by surprise, even though I’d written about RIM’s acquisition of Ascendent and the Ascendent software. There’s a fairly detailed story http://www.networkworld.comhttps://www.networkworld.com//newsletters/wireless/2007/0514wireless2.html just posted today – Thursday – about this, so I won’t repeat all it.
But basically, the what’s now called the BlackBerry Mobile Voice System ties the handheld through the BES and the Ascendent server to your existing corporate PBX. Users end up with a single “corporate” phone number, which for incoming calls rings on all of their phones at the same time: desk, business phone at home, your BlackBerry. Wherever you are, you just answer it.
What seems to be the draw for users is that this can be done with just the addition of the MVS/Ascendent server. There’s no VoIP infrastructure or other complexities to weigh and install.
Your BlackBerry phone now becomes a “voice node” to the corporate PBX, just as your desk phone is.
Part 2: BlackBerry application development
For BlackBerry to be the corporate mobility platform, it needs a growing, healthy development community with the tools to build enterprise-class applications and deploy them.
This is the kind of support and evangelization, even coddling that Microsoft is a master in. But I was impressed by the continuing moves by BlackBerry in this critical area.
One is simply the $150 million investment fund, with RIM and others creating a fund for investing in BlackBerry startup. As they say, $150 million and $150 million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Alan Banner, senior vice president for the BlackBerry platform touched on several areas of activity for development:
One priority is greatly improved Web support, bringing it into the BlackBerry world in much more integrated, and aggressive, way. RIM is adding widgets and rich media to the handset software, and exploiting Web services with the goal of making Web applications “first class BlackBerry citizens,” Banner said. That eventually will have to involve an improved BlackBerry browser.
To enable these changes and many others to be leveraged by what are now over 800 RIM software partners, RIM is creating a set of application frameworks, many of them targeted to vertical markets. The frameworks encapsulate functions and features of the BlackBerry software, enabling ISVs and enterprise developers to more easily build applications that exploit BlackBerry capabilities on the handsets and server.
Banner specifically singled out improved middleware integration for functions like push, sync, and syndication, making more of these functions more easily available through improved BlackBerry APIs.
And last month, RIM released a plugin for the Eclipse development toolset for Java: Eclipse developers can now access BlackBerry APIs and other functions from within Eclipse, without the need for specialized tools. RIM previously released a similar plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio.
