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The Exchange-Blackberry Battle

The Blackberry is the current champ in the PDA market, but it may be under threat from Windows Mobile because Exchange Server 2003 SP2 allows smart phones to scale to a level that the Blackberry can't.

I'm Jason Hiner, content manager for TechRepublic, and today we're going to talk about the Exchange-Blackberry Battle.

In Q1 2005, Gartner reported that Palm was overtaken by Blackberry. Palm has traditionally been the market leader in PDAs. Blackberry became the new top dog. In that same report, Gartner also talked about the fact that 55% of new PDA sales were either wireless or cellular-connected. So obviously with this number going up, you can see why Blackberry is now the new champion.

But some people have said that Blackberry is actually in trouble because later this year, Microsoft is going to be releasing Windows Mobile 2005, and some people have called this the Blackberry killer because it offers a lot of the same usability features that Blackberry has had for a long time and that has distinguished it in the market. However, I would argue that the real Blackberry killer is actually Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 because it allows smart phones to scale to a level that Blackberry currently can't.

So if you have the Internet, and you have your PDA user, if you're using a large scale of Exchange, Lotus, whatever your backend mail-server is, if you're supporting more than about 10 or 20 of these PDA's, then you need to run Blackberry Enterprise Server, which is great and it works. But when you get to a larger deployment, say you have 10,000 phones in your organization, and you want to connect them all to your mail system, if you've got Exchange 2003 SP2, then you can go directly here, and you'd get rid of this all together. If you had 10,000 smart phones and you had a Blackberry on the back and then you try to do it, it would literally taken dozens of these servers to support the same thing that you do with no extra infrastructure here.

So how does Blackberry continue to compete in the market? There are two issues that they have got to face; one, the scalability. They've got to able to allow their product to support larger number of users, and two, is innovation. They've got to continue to innovate and add new features to the product and make it better and stay a step ahead of Windows Mobile.