What a mess of an article. Considering you obviously don't work in a corporate environment nor have any experience deploying / managing mobile devices at a corporate level I'll provide you some feedback as I currently support a large Blackberry deployment as well a GOOD Technology server for those that want iPhone / Android.
1. Blackberry made the needed move earlier this year and put out BES Express. It's free .. no cost, no CAL. Basically a baby BES but has a decent amount of IT policies and allows personal liable Blackberries. Just provide a server to install it on and within an hour or two users are getting corporate email / PIM with all the security you want.
2. Exchange ActiveSync is not a fantastic means to manage mobile deployments. It's a simple email connector with a very limited set of policies (of which iPhone supports some and Android presently none). So if your serious about any other devices to support your going to want a middleware solution and last I checked there is close to 20 at this point.
3. Apple will never make a middleware solution as they have no interest in the enterprise market. They prefer being the trojan horse vs. sharing roadmap, reacting to support issues etc. They would get slaughtered trying to keep enterprise happy and it would eat away profit and time they like making magicial hardware.
3. Google COULD offer a middleware option (they already have BES for Gmail) but it would likely to cloud based and again they don't really have many corporate customers in their cloud (yet). The real action (and money) is large companies that have Exchange or Domino with thousands of users.
4. Enter said middleware solutions, I spend most of my time evaluating these solutions throughout the year and presently GOOD is the clostest to the BES out there. MobileIron, Zenprise, Sybase (now SAP), Boxtone etc are making progress but even with GOOD one thing is very apparent:
Apple and Google need to provide more API hooks into their OS to even get close to what RIM has with BES / BB. Apple is making progress but they only open the API, it takes time for all these solutions to incorporate them and often new API are limited to the latest OS only so what do you do with the users on older iPhones / Androids? It gets messier if they are personal liable as you can't just force them to buy a new device. You also forget to mention Apple or Google don't have (and likely never will) FIPS certification. Do you know how many security issues the iPhone has had? A new doozy just came out. Any security group at large companies cringe at reading these flaws. RIM is being banned for being TOO secure.
5. The DLS (dirty little secret) in all this is RIM is actually cheaper to support. Our GOOD CAL is 3x the cost of a RIM CAL. We could likely move half our users to BES Express and have ZERO middleware expense outside of servers. So we put in a GOOD server and bought seats and have not seen a ROI, we have some happy iPhone / Android users but we are NOT saving money. The only way you save money is forgo security / compliance controls so weigh that and decide what is your risk / benefit.
BTW Motorola OWNED GOOD for awhile and let it die, it's funny now that they have Android it would actually help them. Opps on that one eh. The biggest moron in all this is Microsoft, if they got off their ass and actually made some enterprise management improvements every company wouldn't of dropped their devices and moved to RIM. I just don't see large Blackberry deployments going anywhere. It's fitting the need, provides the security and IS lower cost. So why would we migrate to something else? Right so users can have a higher resolutions screen and some Apps to waste time with.
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