It’s big times for RIM and BlackBerry this week. Firstly, the company has a “little bit of a launch” occurring tomorrow in New York City and several other cities and countries throughout the world. The company is simultaneously launching the new BlackBerry 10 device with which a host of apps for the workplace developed by enterprises and enterprise developers will be available.
According to a press release issued yesterday by RIM, Cisco, SAP, Box, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Truphone, and BigHand are just some of the companies whose applications, collectively used daily by millions of customers worldwide, will be available for BlackBerry 10 at launch.
“The developer community for enterprise and government has been incredible in the support of BlackBerry 10,” Derek Peper, Vice President, Enterprise Partnerships, Research In Motion, said in the press release. “The community sees the potential of the BlackBerry 10 platform to help individuals and organizations make the shift from mobile communications to mobile computing, and have stepped forward with powerful, dynamic and user-friendly applications that can empower employees around the globe.”
RIM made a significant commitment to developers for BlackBerry 10, making it fast and efficient for organizations to develop and manage applications. Developers were provided with toolkits that included the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK with Cascades, to create graphically rich, high performance native apps in C/C++ or the Qt Modeling Language (QML), and the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks™ SDK for HTML5 developers, allowing them to create native-like apps using common web programming technologies (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript).
RIM launched BlackBerry Partners for Enterprise in 2012 to succeed the BlackBerry Alliance program and increase support to the enterprise software and services community. RIM also rolled out the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour – Enterprise Edition to 11 cities to help enterprise application developers and partners develop for or port existing applications to BlackBerry 10.
Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with Bryan Lee, RIM’s senior director, US B2B & Channel Sales, who gave us a preview of some of the new features and functions that will be included in the BlackBerry 10. During our discussion, Lee noted that BlackBerry Balance will be attractive to both business and personal users alike as it essentially allows you to separate your business content items from personal content items on your device.
We also heard that RIM confirmed the BlackBerry 10 will be featured in a commercial during Super Bowl XLVII held this Sunday in New Orleans. I don’t know about you, but for me, the best part of the Super Bowl is watching the new commercials (not to mention the food and drinks), since I am not really a big football fan, and none of my hometown teams are playing this year!
Stay tuned, and check back here for additional reporting on tomorrow’s launch of BlackBerry 10.
