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Research In Motion's mobile middleware solution—BlackBerry Enterprise Server—has long delivered remote access to enterprise e-mail and data from Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino. Until now, organizations using Novell GroupWise for their e-mail have been left without the benefit of BlackBerry-based mobility.

That era is about to end as RIM plans to puts in place the final piece of its enterprise strategy later this year. In the meantime, RIM is previewing its GroupWise solution this week at Novell's BrainShare Europe Conference in Barcelona, Spain.

At the conference, Novell's CTO Alan Nugent said "We continue to work closely with RIM to tightly integrate the BlackBerry wireless platform with Novell GroupWise to deliver a compelling wireless solution for our global customers. BlackBerry Enterprise Server for Novell GroupWise will offer our customers a robust wireless platform to manage all of their wireless needs."

To help satisfy these GroupWise customers, BlackBerry Enterprise Server for GroupWise features the same Mobile Data Service available for other e-mail platforms. This service provides ISVs and in-house corporate developers with an environment that supports corporate data access and interaction capabilities beyond e-mail.

As a result, Novell GroupWise customers will be able to use the BlackBerry architecture and security model to deploy end-to-end applications without any additional infrastructure to learn or support. RIM will also offers GroupWise customers the same AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption as it does with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

Why BlackBerry?
Business people—especially those in the financial and legal sectors—love their BlackBerry handhelds. Some are so addicted to Research In Motion's mobile devices, they even refer to them as "crackberries."

RIM's handhelds were the first mobile devices to reliably deliver wireless e-mail—and later other corporate data—to end-users when away from the office. As a result of this achievement, word of mouth, and BlackBerry's signature QWERTY thumb-keyboards, which made it easy for users to write and respond to messages by avoiding the pitfalls inherent to handwriting recognition and keypad-based text input, RIM is in the position it is today.

The company's BlackBerry handhelds are among the fastest selling mobile devices. According to market research firm Canalys, RIM moved into fourth place ahead of Sony Ericsson for mobile device companies by growing shipments year-over-year an astounding 333 percent. Its overall share jumped from 2.7 percent to 8.2 percent. Only Nokia, palmOne and Hewlett-Packard sell more handhelds and smartphones.

RIM is leveraging BlackBerry's popularity and reputation in the enterprise by extending its availability to other types of handhelds and smartphones (see RIM Bolsters Bottom Line by Licensing). Last week, the company even made a significant consumer market play with the introduction of the BlackBerry 7100t—a more compact and sleek smartphone with a revamped keyboard (see RIM Makes Bid for Consumers with 7100t).