RIM’s BlackBerry Mobile Fusion: What to expect.

As an Elite BlackBerry Alliance partner for many years MSC had little choice but to react to the market swing towards non Blackberry devices.  It's great to see some postitive news from RIM and we look forward to evaluating and welcoming BlackBerry Mobile Fusion to our ever growing stack of MDM platforms that we support.

RIM’s BlackBerry Mobile Fusion: What to expect.

Research In Motion (RIM) the maker of BlackBerry announced on Tuesday 29th November 2011, BlackBerry Mobile Fusion,  its designed to help IT Departments manage not just BlackBerry smartphones and tablets, but  Apple's iOS, Google's Android OS devices, via a web-based interface from RIM.

"We are pleased to introduce BlackBerry Mobile Fusion - RIM's next generation enterprise mobility solution - to make it easier for our business and government customers to manage the diversity of devices in their operations today," said Alan Panezic, Vice President, Enterprise Product Management and Marketing at Research In Motion. "BlackBerry Mobile Fusion brings together our industry-leading BlackBerry Enterprise Server technology for BlackBerry devices with mobile device management capabilities for iOS and Android devices, all managed from one web-based console. It provides the necessary management capabilities to allow IT departments to confidently oversee the use of both company-owned and employee-owned mobile devices within their organizations."

The enterprise market for smartphones and tablets continues to grow in both the company-provisioned and employee-owned (Bring Your Own Device or BYOD) categories. BYOD in particular has led to an increase in the diversity of mobile devices in use in the enterprise and new challenges for CIOs and IT departments as they struggle to manage and control wireless access to confidential company information on the corporate network.

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion will provide the following mobile device management capabilities for all supported mobile devices:

• Asset management
• Configuration management
• Security and policy definition and management
• Secure and protect lost or stolen devices (remote lock, wipe)
• User- and group-based administration
• Multiple device per user capable
• Application and software management
• Connectivity management (Wi-Fi, VPN, certificate)
• Centralized console
• High scalability

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion is currently in early beta testing, and general availability is expected in late March.