Research In Motion Ltd. customers from GoDaddy Group Inc. to asset manager Thames River Capital UK Ltd. are preparing for the worst: the loss of the BlackBerry service their employees depend on to communicate.
RIM’s stock has slumped more than 70 per cent in the past year, and tumbled 19 per cent on June 29 after the company posted a quarterly loss and delayed the BlackBerry 10 operating system, increasing the pressure on RIM to find a buyer or sell assets. While RIM has built infrastructure to ensure continued service, some customers are devising backup plans as RIM prepares to face shareholders at its annual meeting tomorrow.
MORE:BlackBerry-maker RIM battles death spiral, sparks Twitter surge
“In the past three months there’s been a lot of concern that the BlackBerry platform won’t be around in the future,” said Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research, a wireless- industry consultant based in San Francisco. “It’s not unheard of for a large phone manufacturer to go out of business.”
Corporate customers, the backbone of RIM’s business, are fortifying contingency plans so they won’t be affected by a possible breakup of the BlackBerry-maker or other setbacks. With millions of employees connecting to the office through mobile e- mail, companies have been eager to establish a fallback or replacement plan, said Avi Greengart, a technology research director at Current Analysis.
Thames River Capital supplies about 140 of its 170 employees with smartphones, most of them BlackBerrys, said Robert Cockerill, head of infrastructure at the London-based money manager. With the delay of BlackBerry 10 and a service contract with RIM expiring this year, Cockerill said he expects much of his staff to switch to Apple Inc.’s iPhone or devices based on Google Inc.’s Android platform.
MORE:BlackBerry disappearing: An unthinkable concept for many
Service Disruption
Cockerill has brought in MobileIron Inc., a Mountain View, California-based developer of software that helps companies manage and protect data on mobile devices and tablets. MobileIron provides security for Thames River Capital including encryption and password protection for non-BlackBerry devices such as iPads, he said.
Thames River Capital is preparing for scenarios where BlackBerry service may be shut down, disrupted, or if a competitor such as Microsoft Corp. acquires RIM and converts the operating system to its Exchange email service, he said.
“There is a risk of RIM getting bought,” Cockerill said in an interview. “But if you have the right support you can be agnostic and it won’t really matter.”
MobileIron chief executive officer Bob Tinker said his customer list includes 100 Fortune 500 companies, and about a quarter of those customers are financial services firms.
Embrace Innovation
“Large enterprises don’t want to be locked in with a single vendor anymore,” Tinker said in an interview. Customers want to embrace all the innovation in mobile and RIM’s delay of BlackBerry 10 doesn’t help that, he said.
“CIO’s are now asking us: ‘What do we do if RIM gets acquired or if they restructure,’” said Tinker.
MORE:BlackBerry-maker RIM’s wholly avoidable tragedy
Norton Rose LLP, a law firm with 6,000 BlackBerry-equipped employees, is using MobileIron’s software to support iPhones and iPads, which were given to some staff members as secondary devices, said Vlad Botic, group enterprise architect at the London-based firm.
Botic, who said Norton Rose would like to continue using BlackBerrys, began exploring alternatives last year after the three-day BlackBerry outage that caused users around the world to lose data services amid a network failure.
“RIM isn’t in a good position right now,” Botic said in an interview. “The problem with BlackBerry, which was highlighted when the service went down, was that the only way to solve it is with an entirely new device.”
‘Significant Outage’
While the chance of BlackBerry service getting shut down is slim, Botic said he has scheduled a meeting with RIM this week to seek assurances that there won’t be a disruption in the event of a takeover.
GoDaddy, an Internet domain-name and hosting company, could switch users to iPhone or Android devices “within hours,” said Auguste Goldman, chief infrastructure officer at the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company.
In the event of a “significant outage” for BlackBerry devices, GoDaddy has a plan to migrate users to other platforms, Goldman said in an interview.
“The BlackBerry infrastructure and services are among our most valuable assets,” said Nick Manning, a spokesman for Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM. “BlackBerry customers depend on our robust network and they can continue to depend on it going forward.”
RIM shares rose 0.9 per cent to $8.17 at 9:51 a.m. in New York.
iPhone, Android
Six staffers at Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. first began planning for the possibility of a disruption in BlackBerry service last year. To prepare, Nationwide retained Good Technology Inc., whose software for servers and phones can provide secure corporate email and calendar services to iPhones and Android devices.
“You could see that RIM started to decline,” Robert Burkhart, director of new technology innovation at Nationwide, said in an interview.
Today, the number of BlackBerrys Nationwide associates use is down to 7,000 from about 8,500 a year ago, while the number of non-BlackBerry devices used has risen from zero to 4,450, Burkhart said.
“We are well on our way to having a dual environment, so if RIM did go out, we’d be OK,” Burkhart said. “If people are starting contingency plans now, they are behind the eight ball. They should have been looking at this all along.”
Good Technology, which works with 4,000 corporate customers worldwide, including eight of the top 10 financial services companies, has seen an inflow of customers concerned about RIM’s prospects and making contingency plans.
Contingency Plans
“We’ve had two meetings this month with large financial services firms on this topic,” Brian Carr, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Sunnyvale, California-based Good Technology, said in an interview. “In the last year, I talked with half of Fortune 100 companies, and it’s a concern for all of them. Every single one of them is looking at contingency plans.”
The concerns are prompting many companies to speed up their transition from BlackBerries to other types of mobile devices, Carr said.
RIM has struggled to keep up with Apple’s iPhone and devices based on Google’s Android platform. Last month, RIM said it would cut 5,000 jobs and posted a quarterly loss that was five times bigger than projected. Sales last quarter plunged 43 per cent as RIM’s share of the global smartphone industry fell by more than half to 6.4 per cent in the first three months of the year, according to research firm IDC.
BlackBerry Migration
“RIM’s situation is dire, but even in a worst-case scenario, RIM’s servers aren’t likely to get turned off anytime soon,” said Current Analysis’s Greengart. “Still, IT managers are looking more seriously at alternatives to BlackBerry. There’s a whole industry ready to provide security and management around Apple and Android,” he said.
The migration from BlackBerrys started two years ago for Ken Lawonn, senior vice president of strategy and technology at Alegent Health, an Omaha, Nebraska-based health-care provider.
The shift was prompted by user preferences, rather than concerns about the future of RIM, said Lawonn who uses Good Technology’s software. The number of Alegent’s 300 smartphone users with BlackBerrys has shrunk to 10 per cent from about 50 per cent two years ago, he said.
“Should something occur, we believe that’s going to be a fairly easy transition,” Lawonn said. “If my BlackBerry broke down, I’d look at the options, and if a BlackBerry wasn’t available, I’d pick up an iPhone and be on my way.”
RIM’s stock has slumped more than 70 per cent in the past year, and tumbled 19 per cent on June 29 after the company posted a quarterly loss and delayed the BlackBerry 10 operating system, increasing the pressure on RIM to find a buyer or sell assets. While RIM has built infrastructure to ensure continued service, some customers are devising backup plans as RIM prepares to face shareholders at its annual meeting tomorrow.
MORE:BlackBerry-maker RIM battles death spiral, sparks Twitter surge
“In the past three months there’s been a lot of concern that the BlackBerry platform won’t be around in the future,” said Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research, a wireless- industry consultant based in San Francisco. “It’s not unheard of for a large phone manufacturer to go out of business.”
Corporate customers, the backbone of RIM’s business, are fortifying contingency plans so they won’t be affected by a possible breakup of the BlackBerry-maker or other setbacks. With millions of employees connecting to the office through mobile e- mail, companies have been eager to establish a fallback or replacement plan, said Avi Greengart, a technology research director at Current Analysis.
Thames River Capital supplies about 140 of its 170 employees with smartphones, most of them BlackBerrys, said Robert Cockerill, head of infrastructure at the London-based money manager. With the delay of BlackBerry 10 and a service contract with RIM expiring this year, Cockerill said he expects much of his staff to switch to Apple Inc.’s iPhone or devices based on Google Inc.’s Android platform.
MORE:BlackBerry disappearing: An unthinkable concept for many
Service Disruption
Cockerill has brought in MobileIron Inc., a Mountain View, California-based developer of software that helps companies manage and protect data on mobile devices and tablets. MobileIron provides security for Thames River Capital including encryption and password protection for non-BlackBerry devices such as iPads, he said.
Thames River Capital is preparing for scenarios where BlackBerry service may be shut down, disrupted, or if a competitor such as Microsoft Corp. acquires RIM and converts the operating system to its Exchange email service, he said.
“There is a risk of RIM getting bought,” Cockerill said in an interview. “But if you have the right support you can be agnostic and it won’t really matter.”
MobileIron chief executive officer Bob Tinker said his customer list includes 100 Fortune 500 companies, and about a quarter of those customers are financial services firms.
Embrace Innovation
“Large enterprises don’t want to be locked in with a single vendor anymore,” Tinker said in an interview. Customers want to embrace all the innovation in mobile and RIM’s delay of BlackBerry 10 doesn’t help that, he said.
“CIO’s are now asking us: ‘What do we do if RIM gets acquired or if they restructure,’” said Tinker.
MORE:BlackBerry-maker RIM’s wholly avoidable tragedy
Norton Rose LLP, a law firm with 6,000 BlackBerry-equipped employees, is using MobileIron’s software to support iPhones and iPads, which were given to some staff members as secondary devices, said Vlad Botic, group enterprise architect at the London-based firm.
Botic, who said Norton Rose would like to continue using BlackBerrys, began exploring alternatives last year after the three-day BlackBerry outage that caused users around the world to lose data services amid a network failure.
“RIM isn’t in a good position right now,” Botic said in an interview. “The problem with BlackBerry, which was highlighted when the service went down, was that the only way to solve it is with an entirely new device.”
‘Significant Outage’
While the chance of BlackBerry service getting shut down is slim, Botic said he has scheduled a meeting with RIM this week to seek assurances that there won’t be a disruption in the event of a takeover.
GoDaddy, an Internet domain-name and hosting company, could switch users to iPhone or Android devices “within hours,” said Auguste Goldman, chief infrastructure officer at the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company.
In the event of a “significant outage” for BlackBerry devices, GoDaddy has a plan to migrate users to other platforms, Goldman said in an interview.
“The BlackBerry infrastructure and services are among our most valuable assets,” said Nick Manning, a spokesman for Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM. “BlackBerry customers depend on our robust network and they can continue to depend on it going forward.”
RIM shares rose 0.9 per cent to $8.17 at 9:51 a.m. in New York.
iPhone, Android
Six staffers at Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. first began planning for the possibility of a disruption in BlackBerry service last year. To prepare, Nationwide retained Good Technology Inc., whose software for servers and phones can provide secure corporate email and calendar services to iPhones and Android devices.
“You could see that RIM started to decline,” Robert Burkhart, director of new technology innovation at Nationwide, said in an interview.
Today, the number of BlackBerrys Nationwide associates use is down to 7,000 from about 8,500 a year ago, while the number of non-BlackBerry devices used has risen from zero to 4,450, Burkhart said.
“We are well on our way to having a dual environment, so if RIM did go out, we’d be OK,” Burkhart said. “If people are starting contingency plans now, they are behind the eight ball. They should have been looking at this all along.”
Good Technology, which works with 4,000 corporate customers worldwide, including eight of the top 10 financial services companies, has seen an inflow of customers concerned about RIM’s prospects and making contingency plans.
Contingency Plans
“We’ve had two meetings this month with large financial services firms on this topic,” Brian Carr, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Sunnyvale, California-based Good Technology, said in an interview. “In the last year, I talked with half of Fortune 100 companies, and it’s a concern for all of them. Every single one of them is looking at contingency plans.”
The concerns are prompting many companies to speed up their transition from BlackBerries to other types of mobile devices, Carr said.
RIM has struggled to keep up with Apple’s iPhone and devices based on Google’s Android platform. Last month, RIM said it would cut 5,000 jobs and posted a quarterly loss that was five times bigger than projected. Sales last quarter plunged 43 per cent as RIM’s share of the global smartphone industry fell by more than half to 6.4 per cent in the first three months of the year, according to research firm IDC.
BlackBerry Migration
“RIM’s situation is dire, but even in a worst-case scenario, RIM’s servers aren’t likely to get turned off anytime soon,” said Current Analysis’s Greengart. “Still, IT managers are looking more seriously at alternatives to BlackBerry. There’s a whole industry ready to provide security and management around Apple and Android,” he said.
The migration from BlackBerrys started two years ago for Ken Lawonn, senior vice president of strategy and technology at Alegent Health, an Omaha, Nebraska-based health-care provider.
The shift was prompted by user preferences, rather than concerns about the future of RIM, said Lawonn who uses Good Technology’s software. The number of Alegent’s 300 smartphone users with BlackBerrys has shrunk to 10 per cent from about 50 per cent two years ago, he said.
“Should something occur, we believe that’s going to be a fairly easy transition,” Lawonn said. “If my BlackBerry broke down, I’d look at the options, and if a BlackBerry wasn’t available, I’d pick up an iPhone and be on my way.”
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In Monday’s High Court judgment Judge Colin Birss said that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets belonged to the same family as the Apple design when viewed from the front, but the Samsung products were “very thin, almost insubstantial members of that family with unusual details on the back”.
“They do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool,” he said. “The overall impression produced is different.”
The victory for Samsung comes days after a U.S. appeals court lifted a freeze on sales of its Galaxy Nexus smartphones, although it upheld a lower court’s decision to temporarily halt sales of its Galaxy 10.1 tablet.
The two companies are waging legal battles in about 10 countries, accusing each other of patent infringement as they vie for supremacy in the mobile device market.
Samsung welcomed the British High Court judgment, which it said affirmed its own intellectual property rights while respecting those of other companies.
“Should Apple continue to make excessive legal claims in other countries based on such generic designs, innovation in the industry could be harmed and consumer choice unduly limited,” Samsung said in a statement.
Apple said it had no comment on Monday’s judgment, but it reiterated its view on the South Korean company’s designs.
“It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging,” the company said.
“This kind of blatant copying is wrong and, as we’ve said many times before, we need to protect Apple’s intellectual properties when companies steal our ideas.”
Microsoft has already expressed its fondness for Perceptive Pixel's gigantic capacitive touchscreens, which became apparent during a live demo at the company's Windows 8 presentation at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, but now that friendship has become a bit more official. During Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference keynote in Toronto this morning, Steve Ballmer announced that Perceptive Pixel would be coming in-house, with Microsoft acquiring the display maker. The move seems to be in line with the company's recent shift to hardware manufacturing, beginning with last month's Surface introduction and its reinforced commitment to the recently renamed PixelSense smart table solution -- MS has just seized an opportunity to get a bit more hands-on. Full (limited) details are in the press release after the break.
Microsoft to Acquire Perceptive Pixel Inc.
Perceptive Pixel's large-scale, multi-touch hardware and software technology will unlock new collaboration and productivity scenarios.
REDMOND, Wash., and NEW YORK - July 9, 2012 - Microsoft Corp. and Perceptive Pixel Inc. (PPI) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire PPI, a recognized leader in research, development and production of large-scale, multi-touch display solutions.
"The acquisition of PPI allows us to draw on our complementary strengths, and we're excited to accelerate this market evolution," said Kurt DelBene, president, Office Division for Microsoft. "PPI's large touch displays, when combined with hardware from our OEMs, will become powerful Windows 8-based PCs and open new possibilities for productivity and collaboration."
Founded in 2006 by Jeff Han, a renowned pioneer in multi-touch technology, PPI shipped its first multi-touch workstation and large wall solutions in early 2007. In 2008 its technology gained widespread recognition for transforming the way CNN and other broadcasters covered the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In 2009 the Smithsonian awarded the company the National Design Award in the inaugural category of Interaction Design. PPI's patented technologies are used across a wide variety of industries such as government, defense, broadcast, energy exploration, engineering and higher education, and its expertise in both software and hardware will contribute to success in broad scenarios such as collaboration, meetings and presentations.
"We are incredibly excited to be working together on our mutual passion to build technologies that enable people to collaborate and communicate," Han said. "By joining Microsoft, we will be able to take advantage of the tremendous momentum of the Microsoft Office Division, tightly interoperate with its products, and deliver this technology to a very broad set of customers."
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.
About Perceptive Pixel Inc.
Perceptive Pixel Inc. (PPI) is a recognized leader in interaction design, having pioneered the development of large-scale, unlimited multi-touch devices that came to prominence during the historic 2008 U.S. presidential elections. PPI's advanced multi-touch technology platform enables professionals to get closer to their content, removing barriers to understanding, communication and collaboration. PPI is privately held and headquartered in New York. For more information, visit www.perceptivepixel.com.
Perceptive Pixel's large-scale, multi-touch hardware and software technology will unlock new collaboration and productivity scenarios.
REDMOND, Wash., and NEW YORK - July 9, 2012 - Microsoft Corp. and Perceptive Pixel Inc. (PPI) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire PPI, a recognized leader in research, development and production of large-scale, multi-touch display solutions.
"The acquisition of PPI allows us to draw on our complementary strengths, and we're excited to accelerate this market evolution," said Kurt DelBene, president, Office Division for Microsoft. "PPI's large touch displays, when combined with hardware from our OEMs, will become powerful Windows 8-based PCs and open new possibilities for productivity and collaboration."
Founded in 2006 by Jeff Han, a renowned pioneer in multi-touch technology, PPI shipped its first multi-touch workstation and large wall solutions in early 2007. In 2008 its technology gained widespread recognition for transforming the way CNN and other broadcasters covered the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In 2009 the Smithsonian awarded the company the National Design Award in the inaugural category of Interaction Design. PPI's patented technologies are used across a wide variety of industries such as government, defense, broadcast, energy exploration, engineering and higher education, and its expertise in both software and hardware will contribute to success in broad scenarios such as collaboration, meetings and presentations.
"We are incredibly excited to be working together on our mutual passion to build technologies that enable people to collaborate and communicate," Han said. "By joining Microsoft, we will be able to take advantage of the tremendous momentum of the Microsoft Office Division, tightly interoperate with its products, and deliver this technology to a very broad set of customers."
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.
About Perceptive Pixel Inc.
Perceptive Pixel Inc. (PPI) is a recognized leader in interaction design, having pioneered the development of large-scale, unlimited multi-touch devices that came to prominence during the historic 2008 U.S. presidential elections. PPI's advanced multi-touch technology platform enables professionals to get closer to their content, removing barriers to understanding, communication and collaboration. PPI is privately held and headquartered in New York. For more information, visit www.perceptivepixel.com.
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