Research In Motion is in slow motion competing with other players in the smartphone market – Part 4

7. Outsourcing the Blackberry OS

One of the major reasons for Android to give a hard time to Blackberry, and iOS for that matter, is the open-source approach by Google. The number of Android-powered smartphones has always been more than iPhones and Blackberrys because Android can be and is adapted by any company from Samsung to Sony to HTC.

RIM executives have already said that if they’re approached about the new BlackBerry 10 software that they would consider licensing it to a third party. But what about the older elements of RIM’s technology? The company could consider licensing its BlackBerry Enterprise server services to other hardware companies. This would allow Android device makers to offer services, such as RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger.

The company’s network architecture was criticized recently following a major worldwide outage of its services. But this set-up, which funnels all messaging traffic through RIM’s network operations centers throughout the world, also allowed RIM to build one of the most secure messaging platforms around. And other handset makers could leverage elements of this technology to give their own devices an edge.

While there could be a lot of opportunity here, it’s unclear how RIM plans to leverage its own service business in the future. RIM may be moving away from this centralized architecture with the next version of its software. According to the enthusiast site CrackBerry.com, RIM demonstrated at CES that its Playbook 2.0, which uses the same basic software elements as the upcoming BlackBerry 10 software, will use Microsoft’s ActiveSync for e-mail. This shift means that RIM’s future products may not use its network-based architecture for sending email. RIM gets a few bucks per subscriber for providing this service. But if that goes away, RIM may lose a source of high-margin income, CrackBerry said.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Jan 24 2012. Filed under Business, Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.