RIM WES 2010 Report From Widality
Terry Hughes, president and CMO of Widality, developers of the BlackBerry business app Momentem, sent us this report from RIM's recent WES 2010 event in Florida. If you'd like to report on a mobile event you're attending and have your report and company featured on the WIP blog, send me an email at carlo at wipconnector dot com! Thanks Terry (celebrating the 100,000th registered user of
Momentem live at WES), and take it away!
As the developer of a B2B app / service exclusively available for BlackBerry users, I wanted to share my thoughts on WES and on RIM’s strategy too.
Although BlackBerry is way more of a consumer-focused company than ever before (as witnessed by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas doing a keynote!), much of the emphasis was on good old fashioned things like B2B solutions, the needs of the enterprise for mobility, and making money -- yes, making money isn’t a dirty word after all!
RIM appeared assertive and confident, partly because they had made it into the top 5 handset manufacturers list for the first time, and partly because they could boast 41 million active subscribers. App World, their app store, also delivered some impressive numbers: half of all active Blackberry users have now downloaded it, and they are now seeing 1 million downloads per day, a number which is doubling every 6 months. These numbers are dwarfed by the Apple App Store but RIM’s emphasis –- rightly, in my opinion -– is on quality, not quantity. The typical busy BlackBerry user doesn’t have the time to browse through 100,000 apps, which is lucky because there are only 6,500 on App World! RIM’s emphasis on quality was underpinned by their new Super Apps initiative, which I think is the smartest thing they could have done. I wrote a white paper on what Super Apps means for developers, which is available at www.widality.com/super_apps.pdf. Hats off to RIM for encouraging developers to step up to a new level of quality; anybody who has ever downloaded a garbage app will applaud that.
It’s OK for RIM to say to developers “build better apps,” but that costs money. Luckily RIM announced their Payment Services and Advertising Services platforms at WES. I am not sure how much I can say, because much of the info was provided under NDA at the ISV Alliance Summit, but suffice to say that RIM’s approach –- to build a global monetization platform that takes care of payments, micro-payments and advertising –- is music to the ears of developers like us. Monetization of apps has been really tough for most developers, including how to get people to pay for things while they are consuming the benefits of the app, but if RIM gets this right it will be an industry-changer.
I love how RIM has evolved into being a platform company, providing tools that developers can use to build smarter apps, more quickly, and with the enablers to allow users of apps to easily pay for them. BlackBerry 6, their new OS announced at WES, is a major step forward. Everyone compares RIM to Apple, all I can say is that the guys at RIM provide quality support to developers without all the fluff and noise, and their platform is rock solid, especially for apps like ours that have to run seamlessly all day in the background... something that Apple is playing catch-up to.
It’s interesting to see how Blackberry Messenger (BBM) has quietly become a killer app. 50% of all BlackBerry users use it. BBM is the perfect example of a viral app; people use it because they people they communicate with already use it. The fact that it’s embedded on every BlackBerry helps, and is something that RIM’s aggressive program of VPLs (virtual pre-loads) aims to replicate with other notable third party apps. VPLs generate around a 10x increase in uptake of an app; frankly I would have thought it would be even more than that. Maybe RIM is being modest about its excellent VPL and Push technologies.
RIM’s presentations were full of great stats: the highest number of non-disposable apps in the industry, apps that are used most during the workday, the fact that last quarter 75% of all new BlackBerry connections were BIS not BES, RIM has 58% of the North American enterprise smartphone business, and 37% of them are using BlackBerry apps... and on and on. We have published our own white paper on how important metrics are for any app developer, which you can see at www.widality.com/metrics.pdf.
- Much of the conference was about the convergence between the needs of the consumer, professional, and enterprise. HP’s keynote listed seven trends that point to this;
- mission critical managed services,
- mobility as a service / SaaS,
- new generation mobile apps,
- virtualization,
- cloud-based computing,
- the lowering of the mobility TCO (total cost of ownership),
- and harnessing information / data mining.
CSC’s keynote said the biggest trend was the convergence between business apps + mobility + cloud + security + social networking + industry based solutions + location-independent services (i.e. distributed workforce). You get the idea! We wrote a white paper for the WES audience all about how the prosumer, consumer, and enterprise are blurring together to become the “prosumerise”! Check it out at www.widality.com/prosumerise.pdf.
Finally, a few pieces of buzz that I picked up:
- the corporate-liable vs. personal-liable accountability of smartphones within the enterprise was hot, as was Telecom Expense Management
- Tyler Lessard talked about “contextualized personalised services” and Jim Balsillie talked about RIM’s new “concierging” solution. It all boils down to personalising and enriching the experience, something that’s more important now that people use their BlackBerrys for so many things, via so many disparate apps
- Mobile Voice System, RIM’s VoIP deskphone replacement platform, showed that voice calls are still of “bread and butter” importance
- B2B apps are the next big area of growth, something which RIM should be able to dominate for some time to come
In summary, to use the title from a will.i.am Black Eyed Peas song (or should they now be the BlackBerry Eyed Peas having stood alongside Mike Lazaridis on stage!), “I Gotta Feeling” that RIM will continue to be the company of choice for app developers looking to build sophisticated apps that can rise above the noise.