I'm Jason Hiner, content manager for TechRepublic, and todaywe're going to talk about the Exchange-Blackberry Battle.
In Q1 2005, Gartner reported that Palm was overtaken byBlackberry. Palm has traditionally been the market leader in PDAs. Blackberrybecame the new top dog. In that same report, Gartner also talked about the factthat 55% of new PDA sales were either wireless or cellular-connected. Soobviously with this number going up, you can see why Blackberry is now the newchampion.
But some people have said that Blackberry is actually introuble because later this year, Microsoft is going to be releasing WindowsMobile 2005, and some people have called this the Blackberry killer because itoffers a lot of the same usability features that Blackberry has had for a longtime and that has distinguished it in the market. However, I would argue thatthe real Blackberry killer is actually Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2because it allows smart phones to scale to a level that Blackberry currentlycan't.
So if you have the Internet, and you have your PDA user, ifyou're using a large scale of Exchange, Lotus, whatever your backendmail-server is, if you're supporting more than about 10 or 20 of these PDA's,then you need to run Blackberry Enterprise Server, which is great and it works.But when you get to a larger deployment, say you have 10,000 phones in yourorganization, and you want to connect them all to your mail system, if you'vegot Exchange 2003 SP2, then you can go directly here, and you'd get rid of thisall together. If you had 10,000 smart phones and you had a Blackberry on theback and then you try to do it, it would literally taken dozens of theseservers to support the same thing that you do with no extra infrastructurehere.
So how does Blackberry continue to compete in the market?There are two issues that they have got to face; one, the scalability. They'vegot to able to allow their product to support larger number of users, and two,is innovation. They've got to continue to innovate and add new features to theproduct and make it better and stay a step ahead of Windows Mobile.
