David Heit, Sr. Product Manager, RIM

Since joining Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; Toronto: RIM) in 2000, senior product manager David Heit has focused on moving BlackBerry deeper into corporate practices and developing the BlackBerry Exchange Server platform for a wide variety of applications. Now, as RIM moves beyond the distraction of its patent dispute with NTP Software and faces stiffening competition from the new push-email capabilities of Windows Mobile 5.0 and a wide range of new devices from major industry players, he's a leading evangelist for rolling out mobile enterprise applications to BlackBerry devices. He spoke with Unstrung senior editor Richard Martin between sessions at a Gartner wireless conference -- via his BlackBerry, natch.

Unstrung: Can you give us a snapshot of where RIM is, coming off the settlement of the lawsuit?

David Heit: If you look back, even in the last couple of months before the settlement we were announcing and releasing new products. We knew that for our enterprise customers the suit was something that was on their minds and in the news, and we spent a lot of time working with, and talking to, our customers throughout the process of the suit. But it really didn't slow us down a lot, we released the BlackBerry 8700 and BlackBerry Exchange Server 4.1, our latest enterprise server with a lot of feature enhancements.

So without missing a beat we've been getting the message out that it's really not just about wireless email anymore, but about mobilizing your business processes, and the customers are really starting to catch on to that -- they're not looking at using BlackBerry as a wireless email device but as an opportunity to change the way you do things.

UN: We've heard a lot of talk about BlackBerry being a proprietary system while the market is moving more toward open-standards and common platforms across multiple devices.

DH: When I get asked that I always ask, "What do you mean by proprietary?" I've always broken that down -- our BlackBerry Enterprise Server supports the three most popular email environments, Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise, and IBM Domino. Through our MDS [mobile data system] capabilities, you can tie into backend Web services and corporate applications servers, whether they're over a browser or a dedicated application -- you can link to it on your handheld. The BES is kind of the heart of our solution, and we provide open connectivity coming out of that.

And of course it's primarily via the BlackBerry device -- I'm not going to apologize for having the most popular device out there -- but we're not restricting users on that side either. The Nokia 9300, for example, which was just launched yesterday, features BlackBerry Connect. Earlier you saw us announce Palm and RIM partnering to enable the Treo 650.

So you start putting that all together, you can use whatever email platform you want, whatever application or backend data source, over an array of devices, and we're available on every carrier technology that exists today. So where am I locking you down really?

UN: Can you describe the roadmap ahead for companies rolling out enterprise applications via the BlackBerry?

DH: We recognized early on, five or six years ago, that the BlackBerry was not just a point solution for mobile email. Unlike email environments, when you start talking about tying into corporate backend solutions, the users' needs are as varied as the industries and the users are.

When we provided the initial email solution, we created a secure connection from behind the company firewall to the device. And we established IT control and administration of the solution on the device, and obviously the ability to work in connected or disconnected modes.

That all gives us a great deal of flexibility in using the device and the server for these other applications. We've now got tens of thousands of users using the BlackBerry for something other than email, whether its field service workers, that's one very obvious example.

For instance, Suncorp Energy in Canada has all these gas station inspectors, and they used to have paper forms for the inspectors. They created an HTML form, and pushed it to the browser, so the person just clicks on it and there's the form on the handheld.

This platform strategy has evolved over a number of years, and we've got a healthy ecosystem of third-party solution providers that tie into the device to devliver applications.

UN: Healthy enough to compete with the developer community around Windows Mobile?

DH: Well, that's a good question. I really view it from a positive side -- we never assumed we'd be the only ones in this space. Now that you're seeing more industry players show up, it just demonstrates the growing importance of mobility in the overall scheme of enterprise IT. I mean, if you look at Microsoft's messaging solution, they're still focusing on meeting the experience that we already provide. The focus is still on email.

We haven't been standing still -- we're moving forward with these application-development techniques, and that will contine to expand. I see some companies that get excited because they have 100,000 developers working on their platform. We look at it not so much as quantity as the quality of the apps they're providing. If you've got 100 people doing golf scorekeepers, that's not going to do much from an enterprise perspective.

Generally the bulk of developers working on the BlackBerry platform are focusing on truly extending business processes out to the handheld device, and many have been doing it for a number of years.

To Page 2