Thin-client redux
Research in Motion is putting its BES foot forward to secure a spot atop the wireless-server heap
JIM BALSILLIE, chairman and CEO of Research in Motion (RIM), is a man in motion, even when sitting still. He’s intense and driven. He talks fast and is not shy about giving you his opinions.
The trick is somehow applying those traits to convincing the dozens of CIOs he speaks to — evangelizes to is probably more accurate — that RIM has the wireless expertise and vision to be a trusted partner. If Balsillie can pull that off, RIM, not Microsoft, Palm, or Symbian, will be the wireless technology of choice in the enterprise.
Sound far-fetched? Well, consider that Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM announced this month deals with Cingular, Nextel, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T Wireless, and T-Mobile to sell its enterprise server solution, Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), on their 2.5G networks. Consider also new deals with Nokia and Palm to license RIM’s protocol code to access BES. Balsillie corrects me when I pronounce it “bes,” insisting it is pronounced “bez.”
What RIM is doing is cutting its software technology loose from the hardware. The complete hardware package from RIM as we know it will not go away, but it does become secondary.
And as far as what other software finds its way onto handsets, Balsillie couldn’t care less. He insists that claiming which browser and which OS are used on handsets makes a significant difference is a ruse perpetrated by those who sell them.
“This is not a client battle but a server battle,” he says.
Those who remember their high-tech history will understand that Balsillie is making the same claim as Sun’s Scott McNealy. McNealy insisted that all a user needed on the desktop was a thin client with a JVM and a server connection. The difference is Balsillie may be right in this instance.
Sure, every device needs an OS, but if handsets are network devices, which they surely are, then as long as BES can talk to HTTP and the cell phone can serve up a Web page or function as a front-end to a corporate Web store for accessing Web-enabled corporate applications, it just doesn’t matter which browser is doing it. And because the OS is an abstraction layer well above the wireless technology that talks to the server, it too becomes irrelevant on a handset.
“The OS [on a handset] is just a few APIs, and the browser just a simple forms engine,” Balsillie says.
It is worth noting that at present, the three leading handset manufacturers each use their own proprietary OS.
And the truth is, it’s been more than a year since Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola formed Symbian, an OS company that everyone assumed would become the de facto operating system on their phones, and it still hasn’t. Will Symbian be abandoned to the wolves? Have the manufacturers and carriers realized they don’t need Symbian or Palm, and that they certainly don’t need or even want Microsoft? All they need is a technology that will allow business users to access that corporate Web store.
