Phillip RedmanIt wasn’t quite a yawn, but there was far less outcry this week than there would have been two years ago since BlackBerry service was out for three days. As you probably know by now, a core switch failure led to intermittent delays and message delivery failures in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Backlog and cross-Atlantic switching connections even caused disruptions in the United States. Most everybody is up now. The interesting thing is not how it may have been poorly handled and communicated or how high the inconvenience the impact of the outage was to mobile users or costs to lost business. What’s interesting to me is that there wasn’t a bigger outcry from IT managers. Why is that? Many companies today have as many iPhones as they do BlackBerry devices. Fewer of their employees, and their businesses, were impacted by the outage. No doubt it caused havoc for many, but this diversity in mobile devices made it easier to absorb.
Though this outage was a doozy, and not its first, RIM generally has done a great job in the past of having a highly reliable, highly secure system. No doubt this has led companies to believe in the safe and secure use of wireless data on other platforms–though that may not be true. I don’t think this outage will lead to a faster move off of BlackBerry onto other platforms, but it doesn’t build a stronger case to stay. Both Apple and Android platforms have their own security and management issues. But at least one thing can be said, that enterprises supporting a diverse environment will be impacted less if one of them goes down. Just another advantage to non-standardization.
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