RIM unveils BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 for mobile management

Research In Motion is closing out the week with a new platform directed towards its business customer base in the form of BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10.

The service is basically a new, consolidated version of RIM's enterprise mobility management product portfolio for mobile device, security, infrastructure, and app management products. The platform consists of a unified web-based administration console for managing all company-issued smartphones and tablets in one place.

Essentially, the point is that this will be RIM's primary mobile device management offering when it launches during the first quarter of calendar year 2013.

After that, product names such as BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, BlackBerry Device Service and Universal Device Service will be phased out in favor of BES 10.

Jeff Holleran, senior director of RIM's Enterprise Product Management unit, explained in a blog post on Friday afternoon that BES 10 can be integrated with existing BlackBerry Enterprise Server deployments as it is an evolution of RIM's existing enterprise services.

BES 10 represents both an evolution and consolidation of RIM’s enterprise mobility management (EMM) offer to make things simple, flexible, and scalable for your organization. New functionality for managing BlackBerry 10 devices will be included, and existing functionality (currently in BlackBerry Mobile Fusion) will be incorporated into a single product offering.

However, Holleran did point out that BES 5+ will initially require its own server, while BlackBerry Device Service and Universal Device Service can reside on separate servers or be combined on the same physical or virtual server.

Supported devices include BlackBerry 7 OS and prior smartphones, BlackBerry 10 devices, BlackBerry PlayBook tablets, as well as iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.