RIM is doing a fine job at throwing market share away

[svandamme]

Yesterday outage @ the EMEA NOC, started getting word from my customers at 11h00 CET, lasted till 23h00 evening..

NO announcments by RIM, not even a statement on the website or facebook or twitter, to acknowledge there is in fact an issue. Nothing.
They only got a small tweet out at 17h20 CET to say it was going to be fixed at 17h00 (i presume they meant 17h00 UK time)

Now once would be enough, but Today it just started again.. Have customers all over saying it's crapping out again, and this time it looks like some in India are affected as well, that would be a completely different NOC.


Eithere they have been massively hacked , or they forgot to pay the leased lines.


Whatever it is , they will be bleeding market share over this.

They have the worst crisis communication , eg none whatsover.

[Z-man]

Yep - my company also took a hit with yesterday's outtage - esp. since all mobile communications is routed through Stuttgart.

RIM simply doesn't have the infrastructure nor the mobile technology to keep up. But their devices are significantly cheaper than Driods and iPhones - and they do have the enterprise level email interfaces. Still, I don't think they will last another year or so...

-Z-man.

[svandamme]

The things that bugs me the most is the failure to communicate timely and to explain what happened.. And 2 days in a row? seriously unheard off.

[Z-man]

Originally Posted by svandamme

The things that bugs me the most is the failure to communicate timely and to explain what happened.. And 2 days in a row? seriously unheard off.

Well duh -- how could they communicate if their communications network is down?!?

[MysticLlama]

We're down to one BB left in the co., which will be replaced in a month or so, and then that's it, shutting down the server and never going that route again.

It was only a couple dozen devices at its peak, not thousands or tens of thousands like most places, but it's a trend.

My fiance works at a local large hospital and they asked people to stop purchasing them about a year ago so they could phase them out,

[LeRoux Strydom]

All my kids use blackberries. I use a real phone, not some toy-like device named after a fruit....

[dtw]

Stupid question: how does this work? I would have thought that each org used their own servers. How do blanket outages occur for BB services?

[MysticLlama]

With RIM, everything gets routed through their servers at some point.

The non-BB devices pretty much go direct to the company mailservers. (iOS, Android, Windows)

Looks like the issue has also spread to South America and parts of North America.

[Rick Lee]

Mine is not receiving now, but can send. I just noticed the last email showing on my BB is from yesterday afternoon and I've gotten about 100 on my laptop since then.

[svandamme]

Originally Posted by dtw

Stupid question: how does this work? I would have thought that each org used their own servers. How do blanket outages occur for BB services?

Basically RIM provides with a secure tunnel

You device, wherever it is, connects to RIM's Backend
The Corporate BES server, does the same from within your company's firewall/network..

The 2 meet in the middle , RIM connects the 2

That's the BES side of things

the BIS (BB internet services) works different, there BB connects to the BBserver @ rim and that BB server then polls your mailbox.


BIS is less secure then BES because essentially your mailbox must be accessible on the internet.. As would be with Android, Ipod or Activesync devices.


BES is a great system, because the tunnel is almost impossible to hack without access to the device.. so if you lock down the device, it's very secure.

But it all depends on RIM's backend that has to connect device to BES.
And that's where it horribly went wrong the last days.



My prediction : they burnt themselves badly now... pisspoor crisis communication 3 days outage.. anybody who was up for a decision will now decide not to go with RIM... Anybody who's been down for days, will now start looking elsewhere.. and since RIM was already feeling the pressure due to strategic mistakes (playbook for one thing), they will now be taking punches like nothing else.. Because this was the core of everything Blackberry that went down it voids their main advantage over "the others" and makes it a negative.


the only thing they could do, is open it up, release the new QNX devices with the option to connect to non RIM relays @ the companies.

But if they do that, 1 RIM looses the monthly kickback per user, they get via the Operator , they loose the revenue & control

2 the NSA's of the world will flip out because then it becomes truly a black hole to them.

At least now up to a point, they (NSA) still can do some magic if the have access to RIM's infrastructure , which they do if it involves national security , if that goes open, and the keys are upgraded, it becomes next to impossible to hack for even the NSA..


So i don't think they will/can/want to go that route. even though it is the only way they can remove themselves as the bottleneck/point of failure.