RIM Not Worried About Microsoft, Co-CEO Says

Research In Motion Co-CEO Jim Balsillie said he is not worried about Microsoft's latest assault into his market space.

In a keynote loaded with pot-shots at the Redmond, Washington software giant, the executive best known for the popular Blackberry device said the future is about service-oriented architectures and workflows for consumer and enterprises.

Balsillie said "persistence and contextualization" of Internet services will drive growth -- not the operating system or simple push e-mail.

Some observers maintain Microsoft has a better play against Research In Motion because its six-month-old Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, when combined with its recently released Exchange Service Pack 2, offers push e-mail for the first time.

But Microsoft's past efforts in the mobile space, such as its acquisition of SendIT, massive investments in satellite carriers and developing many iterations of Windows Mobile and CE have had little success -- and for good reason, Balsillie said. It's about the middleware, not the operating system, he said.

"The operating system in the device is 200 kbytes in code. It's a bit element in the system. A task manager," Basillie told hundreds gathered at his alma mater. "The operating system doesn't matter."

"People buy service. I've got 60,000 customers and the CIOs don't tell me they want the operating system. It's not about the OS, it's all about persistance."

The Blackberry chief said the value of his platform goes well beyond Microsoft's new push e-mail.

The future of his business is based on service-oriented workflow, faster data networks and partnerships with Internet service firms such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft to offer event-driven services and permission-based advertising to consumers and business.

"There will be more event-driven stuff," he told hundreds gathered at the Cambridge, Mass. conference, noting that tools and middleware platforms will be used to create automated management processes.

The number one application will be workflow, and RIM will support enterprise instant messaging and real-time services including Microsoft LiveMeeting and Lotus SameTime to enable collaboration in the field, he said.

"The big efficiencies are on the management side. If you can pre-process information and have it event driven and spur collaboration you can transform how work is processed," he said.

"You can have instant messaging with multimedia in context and presence [of users]," Balsillie added. "That is what I think will be interesting in the next couple of years. Service-oriented workflows and faster EVDO networks."

Yet Basillie readily acknowledges the importance of linking the Blackberry device not only to emerging services from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft but also to the landscape of servers in distributed computing networks.

"It'll be SAP, ERP, BI, CRM, all broad vertical and horizontal applications," Basillie said before roughly 250 gathered for the event in Cambridge, Mass. "Going forward, that essence of changing your relationship with information and context will create new business models," he said. "Services is a new reality that is happening."

RIM has taken a page out of Microsoft's playbook and is beginning to build out an ecosystem of ISV and service partners and recently launch application development platform.

But the notion that Microsoft can extend Windows' massive share of the PC market to mobile devices is flawed because the operating system is irrelevant, he claimed.

"I don't fight this war publicly. [The Blackberry] is an optimized presentation terminal. It's just a Windows terminal into back end services. It's not a distributed computing world."

The firm has an 18-month lead on its competitors, support from more than 750 carriers, more than $2 billion in the bank, and "is not standing still," Basillie added.

Over the past year, for example, Research in Motion has better equipped its middleware platform to support SmartPhones and inked a major deal with Nokia to expand its presence in the SmartPhone marketplace.

In January, the Toronto firm will released its Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.1 update, which will enable IT managers to provision applications to workers in the field for the first time.

The last update, version 4.0, provided users with the ability to wirelessly synchronize their data without plugging into a physical port.

Earlier this month, for example, the Waterloo, Ontario company announced a wireless application framework called the Blackberry Mobile Data System that supports Web services and services-oriented architecture.

The product has a visual designer that taps into both Java and .NET-based services-oriented architectures and platforms that can be sued by SIs, ISVs and corporate developers to create wireless applications. " We have tools that can link to your applications, and we built in visual design tools so you can do customization and workflow," he told the audience at the Harvard Business School's annual Cyberposium.

In a brief interview with CRN following his keynote, Basillie said he intends to continue partnering with carriers as his core OEMs but the firm is expanding beyond its direct model to attract ISVs, systems integrators and corporate developers to its platform.

"OEMs are "moving up the food chain but through partnering we are flowing through other channels and it's the beginning of our indirect model, " Balsillie said. "We've been direct B2B and now there's more of a shift to indirect channels, including ISVs and retailers."