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Freedom from patent litigation and a possible shutdown wears itself well on Research In Motion (RIM). Ever since the BlackBerry-maker settled its five-year legal engagement with holding company NTP in March for $612.5 million, it has aggressively introduced new hardware and service products, entered new markets, made significant acquisitions and - recently - indicated it would bring a range of long-awaited features to its handhelds.

Today, the world's leading mobile e-mail provider unveiled Hosted BlackBerry Enterprise Server, a version of its behind-the-firewall BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) solution for the almost half of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are already outsourcing their e-mail systems. It enables these companies to wirelessly extend their messaging and application systems without the need for internal IT resources, according to RIM.

"Many small and medium sized businesses utilize outsourced e-mail solutions and employees of this group tend to also be among the most mobile in the marketplace," said Stephen Drake, Program Director for IDC's Mobile Software service.

RIM said Hosted BES delivers all the features of a traditional BES installation. These include tight integration with Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise and the same security, reliability, and IT policy controls. There's also secure wireless access to e-mail, enterprise instant messaging, Web browsing, intranet, organizer and applications, in addition to support for hosting of mobile applications that run on BlackBerry devices via the BlackBerry Mobile Data System (MDS).

With MDS, organizations can deploy custom-made or out-of-the-box field service, sales force automation, CRM, healthcare, transportation, logistics or SAP applications, for example, to personnel and their BlackBerrys.

Hosted BES will be offered by carriers and service providers, which also deliver RIM's BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS). Unlike Hosted BES, however, BIS only enables push e-mail on user's handheld.

"For wireless carriers, offering hosted services builds on existing data network and business offerings, leading to increased data usage on their networks and new expanded target market segments," according to IDC's Drake.

Hosted Meet Express
That's exactly what RIM is attempting to do for itself by further expanding its wares beyond the enterprise. In fact, Hosted BES compliments a product the company introduced in May called BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express; also targeted at SMBs, but those with in-house e-mail systems.

SMBs run the whole gamet, explained RIM Senior Product Manger David Heit. He said to PDAStreet, "When you target the small to medium-sized business segment, it's not a very homogenous market at all. You've got everything from somebody that has a hosted e-mail account from some ISP provider to those running an e-mail server in-house."

Like Hosted BES, BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express delivers the very same capabilities as BlackBerry Enterprise Server, but it is an actual download that resides on the network, and is free to anyone who purchases a new BlackBerry handheld. To register for Express, users simply enter their device PIN.

After the initial first license, companies must pay $99 for each additional one, with a maximum of 15 users supported. Should they want to add more than 15 users, then they can purchase an electronic unlock key to the full BlackBerry Enterprise Server, making Express quite scalable.

With Hosted BES, Heit explained that the user contacts his hosted e-mail provider and lets them know he has a BlackBerry to go wireless. There's no upfront costs and there's no need to install a server, as the host is providing that for you. This works well for half the small businesses on the market.

When PDAStreet asked if Hosted BES would work for those with an e-mail system deployed on premises, Heit said it was possible; but it all depended on the organization. In this scenario, he pointed out slightly larger businesses were likely to find a hosted solution attractive; as long as the connection between their on-premises e-mail server and service provider was fast enough.

Heit said, "They got 50 or 100 users or whatever." And are saying to themselves, "We should probably be spending a little bit more management time on this, but don't have any. Can we get somebody to outsource this too? Pick it up as a service."

Service providers have attempted to provide a hosted BES solution to customers in the past, but now that RIM has an official offering an a licensing model, the company expects a lot more to jump on. Heit said we'll see a bunch of announcements from carriers and ISPs introducing Hosted BES solutions over the coming months. The cost of the Hosted BES service itself and how the providers bundle will it be up each ISP and carrier.

Report Card
For last fiscal quarter, a three month period ending June 3rd, RIM reported earnings of $129.8 million with the addition of 680,000 users, while increasing revenue by 35 percent. The BlackBerry-maker revealed profits of $0.68 per share compared to $0.67 per share on income of $132.5 million during the same period a year earlier, outperforming analyst expectations of $0.65 per share.

Revenue grew to $613.1 million from $453.9 million last year, with 71 percent of sales coming from BlackBerry handhelds—RIM shipped about 1.2 million BlackBerrys— and 19 percent from services. RIM now has about 5.5 million customers.

For its next quarter, RIM expects earnings of between $0.67 and $0.73 per share, with revenue increasing to around $620 million to $650 million.