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Is RIM's Centralized Network Model Broken?
wiredmikey writes "Is RIM's centralized network model broken? Andrew Jaquith thinks so, and provides an interesting analysis on why RIM should move to a decentralized model. After two long outages this month, many believe that the end is drawing near for Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. But is Research In Motion in trouble? Financially, RIM continues to be a healthy company, throwing off billions in profit each year. But if it doesn't 'think different' about its network strategy, its customers may think different about their choice of handset vendor, Jaquith argues. Jaquith says RIM should dismantle its proprietary centralized delivery network, something that has been a key strength for the company. Data plans that provide TCP/IP over wireless carrier networks are now ubiquitous, nullifying a key RIM advantage. Does BlackBerry need to rethink its network model to effectively compete moving forward?"
if they put a server in every country. That way they can avoid the so called "judicial" issues in countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, Egypt, Russia etc.. and get a decentralized network at the same time. They can also follow Google's example. Every time I log into Gmail, it passes thru google.com.sa for authentication i.e. my password and authentication info are stored on a server with a local address!
They were way ahead of their time - in 1999, but now they're just a fossil.
if it wasn't for my blackberry's b0rk3d network
BlackBerries get free email etc. while roaming (abroad). Who else offers that? For people who travel and email for business, that's still a key advantage.
A lot of carriers in Europe and Australia add a monthly surcharge on BlackBerry contracts. Vodafone Netherlands, for example requires you to pay an extra €5/month if you choose a BlackBerry handset (increasing the price from €23 to €28 per month). There's no similar fee for iPhone or Android users. I'm sure this must be costing RIM more than a few customers.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
It's the most efficient, one hickup and you need to rethink everything? how about it ran perfect for several years?
Btw it worked for napster didn't it?
Given the amount of legacy investment(not just on RIM's part; but on the part of some of their bigger corporate customers) in their proprietary stuff, its relatively good uptime history, and the fact that some people still value its particular set of advantages and disadvantages, it seems insane for RIM to scrap it. Consider, which of the following seems easier and less risky:
1. Scrap proprietary BBM/BIS/etc. and attempt to recreate featureset of the same in midflight with some sort of decentralized setup.
Or:
2. Keep all the various RIM-specific tricks around; and take advantage of the fact that flash is cheap by buying or building an IMAP/Activesync mail client that runs on your handsets(and has a bunch of centralized knobs and switces to keep the BES admins of the world happy). If the customer wants a classic blackberry, turn it off. If they want a decentralized offering, turn it on. If they want both, turn both on.
A couple outages don't remove the reasons why the blackberry is in use. Doesn't matter if it sucks, it only has to be better than the competition in it's particular market. It still is. yawn.
Centralized computing works fabulously (and inexpensively) if you've got the right infrastructure. Mainframes work.
I think anyone who has ever experienced a blackberry outage and had to explain it to his CEO will have learned how the blackberry chain works and how everything MUST go through their servers creating a global single point of failure.
It's just a bad idea to put all of your eggs in one basket.
Andrew Jaguith must be American, in countries with pay per use data models, RIM has a 3:1 advantage over other platforms, when traveling and paying between $1 and $13 per MB of data the savings drasticly add up.
Beyond data compression, RIM's security model is largely supported by having centralized notds, there is no dns spoofing, this helps RIM obtain FIPS certification that much sooner.
What RIM does need to do is improve redundancy, and centralize per country more so when a single node goes down it doesn't cause as wide spread an issue, I can say I have had more service interuptions from my home internet supplier in 4 years than I have had from RIM, and I spend 100+ nights away from home a year
.... Exchange / ActiveSync and it's abilities keep growing at a rapid rate. And it's much easier to administer with a good selection of policies and lockdowns availible. As much as uneducated halfwits fuck up Exchange installs - seriously you want a monkey to run your mail system? You get shit. Find a real Mail admin and they will make Exchange solid and just works - the fact is that for business ActiveSync is a godawful load easier and works with a much wider range of hardware, verses the nightmare BES can be. Let alone iPhones and Android also talk much better to other mail platforms, not just Activesync.
Once Exchange gains the last bits of the featureset - and for almost everyone the featureset is more than enough - then why the hell would you even consider Blackberrys? The fact is that it's not the network that the issue for RIM, it's the fact the competition is arguably better. As much as it wont wash to some here, Exchange is a platform that RIM is not keeping up with and is not offering anything truly compelling over.
The trivial and common response to this (and the original post I was going to write) is that it needs to GO because its competitors don't do this and, thus, don't have to worry about losing internet and email service if one cluster of huge servers somewhere in their country goes dark for a bit. Many consumers might have agreed with this school of thought with their wallet and went elsewhere.
The thing to keep in mind, however, is that this centralised model was NEVER meant to "serve" regular home consumer usage patterns. Remember their devices from yesteryear? You know, the business-only, no bullshit phones that would be totally useless for Joe Consumer? That, if anything, showed that their target market was for people who needed really good phone and email device with extra high security, if required. Their centralised model (outages aside) ensures the highest quality for both of these requirements with a battery life that is still unmatched by iOS or Android
The problem is that the market has shown that most people are fine with "good enough," and Blackberry devices are FAR from that. Their Their work phones might still rule with email, but their iPhone or Droid does that and much more satisfactorily enough to meet their needs. It's also cheaper per month and has more "apps." Additionally, they are, slowly but surely, becoming secure enough to be seriously considered for the workplace. Once this happens, Blackberry has no leg to stand on.
I think RIM needs to worry about moving their phones to the 21st century. Outages happen; bad market strategy shouldn't.
Everyone else says "To The Cloud We Go!", RIM's model is the most secure.
There will always be a demand for the Soviet-style centralized IT that RIM's system represents. It's the same old kind of mentality that insists "no personal calls on a business cell phone" or (heaven forbid) browsing the interwebs while on company time.
All the companies I know have either switched away from Blackberry, or at least opened their policies to say "get whatever phone-device you want, here's your budget, and tech-supporting it is your problem". Nobody, given that option, chooses Blackberry.
RIM will continue to be profitable, and actually their service will probably improve as the load on their systems decreases.
-Styopa
its way too late for that. these guys are gonna sink faster than the titanic. every single other phone out there now is better than a blackberry except for cheap 20 dollar nokias. my boss for example has a blackberry that he's return about 6 times in 6 months for all kinds of problems. I give them until maybe 2013 at the latest
RIM as a whole reminds me of a scene from the Simpson's several years back: Principal Skinner is wandering around a boarded up part of Springfield that use to house "wholesome" activities and such and he briefly wonders if he's just out of touch with what's going on. Only to come to the conclusion that no...everyone else is wrong. This is how I see RIM/BB. Smartphones evolved and they're still serving up the same ol' stuff. Great, you're a "corporate" phone. Guess what. That market isn't growing anymore.
Going forwards, they have to leverage cloudsourced meta resources to enhance avoision of non-functational points of zeta-inflection.
If their in-house IT isn't on board with those pre-bleeding edge concepts, I'd be happy to run a seminar at a 5 star spa of their choice.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It's bad enough having to manage GroupWare or Exchange, but having to run some horrible RIM BlackBerry enterprise bloatware on them just so BB users can get email is ridiculous.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
This comment is biased, way biased. I absolutely hate RIM and hope they die a slow and painful death. Their licensing scheme took advantage of us for years and now the cheapest Droid blows them away. After setting up a few Droids and a butt load of Iphones, I will offer to buy my users a smart phone just for the privilege of switching them over. That way I get to personally throw the crappy BB phone down the back stairwell myself. Then I put the BB in a box addressed to RIM HQ with a letter explaining and a video showing me and my techs throwing the damn thing against a cinder block wall.
;)
There, I feel much better now.
PS: we only have one user left on the BES and I simply cannot wait to switch him over and turn that server off. No P to V for that server. More like P to oblivion.
RIM you can KMA, long live the Iphone, long live the Droid.
Many companies have what appears to be great years right up to the point they go bankrupt. One of the leading indicators they are in trouble is erosion of margin, or their ability to make a healthy profit on each widget (handset) sold. This is happening at RIM. They are in trouble. There is hope. Most companies the size of RIM have enough capital to reinvent themselves. In their case that might mean building a healthy OS, something they have not done yet. It also means being really focused, again something they are absolutely terrible at.
and wants you to stop using its smokescreen....
You are supposed to say "Chinese" now.
RIM is still making money, and the one big factor that everyone seems to forget - BES. Nobody else even comes close to being able to offer companies the level of fine-grained administrative control over their companies devices as to RIM through BES. I work for a public company and whenever the discussion about phones comes up, one of the first questions is how one is supposed to remotely administer, control, and if needed, wipe the phones. The discussion pretty much starts and stops with BES. I'd love nothing more than to use an iPhone, but what am I going to do, install iTunes on every corporate PC? Have each user individually sign up for a 'find my iphone' account? No. With with an OSX Server (running on Apple's official server hardware - a Mac Mini), iPhone control leaves a lot to be desired.
BES is still a HUGE hook for businesses. I know Apple and Google boast that a lot of fortune 500 companies use iPhones/Androids, but until they can demonstrate their business compatibility (ala not having to install iTunes on every corporate machine, being able to centrally restrict apps, etc), RIM is still going to own a huge chunk of the corporate pie.
And when I say I'd love to be using an iPhone (or Android) - I'm serious. I use a new Bold 9900, and I think it's a POS. It can't even smoothly play the HD video that it recorded, despite it's crystal HD engine or whatever they call it. The browser reminds me of IE5. Hotlinks and the ability to click on them is still a fairly new, radical concept.
RIMs centralized model is probably all that's keeping them alive right now... at least in Canada.
Every provider in Canada offers an atrocious data plan, or a "blackberry plan" (I'm assuming by subsidy from RIM) that you can only use on blackberries. The "blackberry plan" of course comes with free emails, BBM, facebook, and text messages but no "data" (ie. dynamic web browsing).
Not only does this give lower budget users a cheap way to access popular data services but it ties them in to proprietary technologies like BBM where they build networks and become dependent.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Another company is buying them.
This weird transition junk happens before a public announcement comes out.
Watch the news, people.
I laugh until I cry when I see people saying that the blackberry infrastructure is old school, when the big corporations and users are throwing so much money and data at cloud computing.
Blackberry backend is cloud infrastructure in the purest form. The guarantee of the BB Cloud is that It offers a guarantee that your data will get through to the end customer. This is the essense of cloud computing. Yes, when it goes down your data gets held up but this is the same with any cloud infrastructure. In the case of this latest outage, I do not believe there was much if any lost transactions and it simply came down to long delays.
Yes, it is true that RIM can do a much better job at building and scaling their infrastructure to be future ready. Tripple fault tolerance on all infrastructure in any cloud computing is an absolute must and this should be the minimum that all companies adhere to. RIM will need to raise the bar a few more noches to ensure that their cloud maintains the highest possible level of quality of service.
Many argue that BIS and BES is too complex a model and needs to be simplified. This cannot be farther from the truth. In order to make large and complex solutions robust and scalable, you must add complexity by adding extra layers within the infrastructure in order to make it work. Stable, secure and light weight messaging and data transactioning can only be done with a cloud infastructure in between.
The biggest challenge with the blackberry cloud is not its instability but rather that when it fails, many users are affected and thus it is good news to post on blogs. In reality, the BB cloud is likely more stable on average than most other solutions out there for messaging and data transfer from mobile devices. The only reason you do not hear otherwise is that failures are localized and would only affect hundreds of users which does not make for very good news.
- JsD
I mean, people use it, they like having it all there. The Blackberry *does* support people using their own servers, and people choose not to do it. The Blackberry server is convenient for people in terms of setup, the manageability stuff (being able to remote wipe your phone if it's stolen for instance) is nice (and there isn't some IETF standardized method of doing this so it's not going to fly without the central authority to do it as it stands...). The Blackberry compresses all it's data too (web and E-Mail) -- in the past this greatly sped up page loads... for a while it was useless... now that AT&T and VZW are going to horribly restrictive capped data plans this is important again.
That's really all I can say... it seems a bit odd from a technological standpoint, but people have the choice of NOT using the centralized servers and they choose to use them.
is that they get key management right. No external CA, everything is in their hands.
Every company or organization who wants to operate something similarly safe can already do it (disable all external CAs on the devices you give to your employees, and roll out your own CA in the correct way). It will cost, probably the same amount it would cost to operate a BB, since the main cost is not the technology or the setup but the logistics to get qualified and reliable employees in a safe organization to distribute the keys onto the employees.
Now if several organizations want their employees to communicate safely on the other hand then its getting a little bit more troublesome, but then a compnay like RIM could provide a mail transport agent between companies which requires some more authentication than usual.
There is actually one company in Canada (Koodo, owned by Telus) that has the best deal to get your Blackberry used at its full potential. They give you a 'Data Connect' package for $25/mo and you can use up to 2Gb (with a G). I believe this also lets you tether with a Playbook.
A completely centralized network model that services clients across the entire planet is, by definition, broken.
I think the concept was always broken. It's why I no longer use a Blackberry, even though it's the best integrated device with the best keyboard. Our Enterprise server went down for a week and a half, for reasons I will not go into right now, and by the time it was up again many of us had switched to Android or iOS. BES provides some really great features, when it's running. A single point of failure is fine, until it fails. And then it's not funny anymore.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Who controls the BES? If it was based on an open protocol, everybody could just run their own server. Since its not, you have to either use the BES of your network operator, or buy a product you cannot look into.
Of course the network operators see this as a feature. They want control, and they want to do more than just shuffling around bits. That's why they heavily subsidize everything giving them control over the device. For a long time this meant that devices supporting OpenVPN or VoIP wouldn't be subsidized. Since the majority of phones are bought by operators, the devices are built according to the wishes of the operators.