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Technology news and Jobs arrow Cornered! arrow The inconvenient truth about Blackberry
The inconvenient truth about Blackberry PDF E-mail
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by Stuart Corner   
Tuesday, 19 February 2008


Which makes these quotes in the press release, from Curt Hopkins, head of enterprise mobility solutions at Vodafone UK, rather laughable. "Vodafone as a company relies on continuous mobile access to email and we have also selected the Neverfail solution to use within our own organisation...Having complete confidence that email will be available 24/7 365 days a year is a significant advantage as many key staff depend on access via Blackberry devices in order to fulfil their roles."

Not only does RIM provide no details of the resiliency or redundancy built into this system, it does its best to conceal the fact that it even exists. Given how dependent so many people have become on their Blackberries, I don't think this is good enough. At the very least customers should be aware of the possible failure points in the services and be given some information on what RIM does to ensure service continuity. As Neverfail points out: "In today's business environment access to email whilst on the move is a key requirement for many organisations. Losing email access, even for a short time, can have drastic consequences for businesses."

In the wake of last week's Blackberry outage, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney was reported saying enterprises that really need e-mail responses in less than eight hours to run their businesses should have a backup for the BlackBerry: they should also set up an independent system to notify them whether an important contact has received or replied to an e-mail message.

Seems like a good market opportunity there: unless and until RIM gets its act together and delivers the five nines reliability which is the level of service availability to which telcos have long aspired. That by the way equates to just 30 seconds down time a year.

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