BlackBerry Begins New Corporate Push

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BlackBerry begins new corporate push

By Asina Pornwasin

The Nation

Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of BlackBerry smart phones, is turning its focus back to the corporate market, with the additional aim of building a community of local application developers for BlackBerry.

After trying for a few years to gear the strength of its BlackBerry Message (BBM) application - so popular in the corporate world - to the needs of Thailand's consumer market, the Canadian phone maker has announced a renewed focus on the corporate market, while not relaxing its push in the consumer field.

The company's director for Thailand and Malaysia, Dany Boldue, said the intention was to expand RIM's presence in Thailand, especially outside Bangkok, and among large corporations, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the government sector.

"We will encourage corporations to use the BlackBerry Message platform to utilize their working applications. We are targeting many sectors, including financial, export, agriculture and automobile firms. We aim to expand our SME market through our local partner, SIS Distribution, and to approach the government sector, which is a big opportunity for us," said Boldue.

The company will promote its BBM application-programming interface (API) - the interface implemented by the BBM platform to enable interaction with other software - in the hope of encouraging the development of a wide range of applications around the BBM environment in Thailand. RIM is currently encouraging similar application development in all countries where BlackBerry phones are used.

At its DevCon2010 developers' conference last month RIM announced that it was opening up a BBM social platform. The move allows developers access to the social features of BBM as well as integrating with nearly all the first-party applications in a "Super App" fashion.

The platform includes chat capabilities, content sharing and invitations. Users will be able to invite their BBM friends to join them in a game and then chat with one another while the game is in progress.

BBM functionality that is accessible to developers through the BBM social platform includes contact list, BBM user profile, application, data transfer and invitations.

For example, users can create BBM friend groups specific to an application, transfer pictures, audio, video and other content directly from an application to their BBM contacts or groups, invite new friends to BBM, invite their friends to interact within or download an application and they can accept invitations, all from within an application.

These new application-programming interfaces will be available early next year. Developers should register with RIM to receive updates on the new BBM social platform.

Boldue was at pains to point out that BBM was not just an application, but was a platform.

"We arranged the first BlackBerry Developer Days in Thailand last month," he said. "We gathered about 300 local application developers in the hope of encouraging them to roll out applications for BlackBerry users in Thailand."

He said that BlackBerry App World offered three benefits to attract developers: the BBM platform's large user base; BBM development tool kits that helped developers to monetize their applications; and RIM's strong support and promotion on App World.

"Currently, there are more than 28 million BBM users around the world and there are 2,000 new BBM users every hour. There have been more than 35 million downloads from App World, at a rate of about 1.5 million downloads per day. It is a huge potential market for developers," Boldue said.

However, he said the consumer segment was still providing huge growth for RIM in Thailand, and BlackBerry held leadership of the consumer market both within and outside Bangkok.

RIM was still concentrating on the business world when it first entered the Thai market, but it then created the "BB phenomenon" and became very successful in the local consumer market.

Its latest move, focusing once again on its strength among business users, seems to be preparing for a comeback of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 in the Thai market.

Research In Motion has also introduced its new BlackBerry Bold 9780 in Thailand. It is expected to be available in December, at the same time as the recently launched BlackBerry Torch reaches the market.

-- The Nation 2010-11-23