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Gartner reports that worldwide sales for Smartphones topped 32 million units for the second quarter of 2008.  It seems that the North American consumer shrugged off any thoughts of a downturn in the economy.  This market experienced an annual increase of over 78%.  Even with new competitors and the new touch screen technology, Nokia kept its leading worldwide market share, although its growth rate was half the market average.  Nokia will address this sluggish growth by introducing its own touch screen Smartphone later this year.

On the other hand, Research in Motion (“RIM”), the maker of the Blackberry, came in with a stalwart performance for 2008 topping 126% growth from last year.  Gartner reports:

“RIM continued to execute well at the consumer level, increasing its global market reach. In the second half of the year, the company is expected to launch smartphones based on new form factors, which are necessary to keep pace with the competition at the consumer level”

The apparent lackluster sales for the Apple iPhone was due to inventory troubles on the initial sales of the iPhone, but we should expect record sales numbers for the second half of this year.

Read the complete story as reported by Judy Mottl of InternetNews.com in her article Smartphones Show No Signs of Slowing.

Speaking of RIM and its latest clamshell BlackBerry …

Research in Motion announced its latest entrant into the consumer market with the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220.  This model is aimed at Apple’s iPhone consumer based market and not the conventional RIM enterprise user.  The usual full keyboard has been reduced to a 20 button keyboard which favors the web surfing of consumers over the text entry preference of the enterprise user.  Competition in this space can be fierce with such competitors as Apple’s iPhone, Nokia’s Symbian OS, and the soon to be released Google Android.

AR Communications analyst, Carmi Levy, commented on RIM’s strategy,

"RIM's ability to get all of its next-generation devices out the door and into the channel by year's end as originally planned is critical to its continued market and revenue growth,"

This latest 8220 Flip open Smartphone boosts 2 LCD screens.  When closed, the outside LCD allows the user to preview calls, emails, and text messages.  Also available on the 8220 will be AOL AIM and ICQ instant messaging services, and AOL Mail.

Read RIM's BlackBerry 'Flips' Out to Woo Consumers for a more complete story.

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In my reading of interesting and relevant articles posted on the web, there have been several follow-on articles which expand on some of my more recent posts to this Blog. Due to the number of articles that I have come across, I thought it best to cite to some these articles, with a line or two of brief explanation, and let the reader pick and chose any article(s) of interest. I found the following to be of particular interest:

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  Time to Scrap Your BPM Spreadsheets? SMBs have powerful SaaS alternatives: Here is a way to streamline the budgeting and financial planning process. This will facilitate collaboration, what-if scenarios, and contingency planning.
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  Apple Watchers Salivate Over 3G iPhone Rumors - Developer conference expected to be launch venue for new iPhone: This will be one to watch this week. Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) starts Monday, June 9th in San Francisco. Could this be Apple’s answer to the recent flurry of applications announced to be integrated into the BlackBerry?
  
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  Software Sales in 'SaaSy' Transition - The consumer-inspired trend of easy, online access to applications is finding a ready market in the enterprise: What can I say. We told you so. This is a discussion about applications designed for the end-users and not colorful reports to impress the top brass.
  
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  BlackBerry Defies Stagnant Tech Spending - Companies are untying IT purse strings for smartphones but not for much else these days: With IT spending slowing down, RIM’s market share is estimated to reach 82% this year.
  

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Let’s start with full disclosure – I own a BlackBerry Curve. It provides me the freedom I require. I am not tied to the office. I can be out of the office and still receive my emails and determine if the email or document promised to be sent to me has indeed arrived. I can also get a quick note out and/or be responsive to a client’s email and simply state “Not in office. Call U later.” Instead of waiting to the end of this article for the “Moral of the Story”, let me state upfront in my opinion that the secret to high-tech (and especially wireless) should be to make the technology work for you and not the other way around. As of late, there has been a flurry of news surrounding 3G and RIM’s BlackBerry and so I am not quite sure that making the technology work for you instead of you being tied to the technology can remain as my mantra, but I will try. I do not intend for the following to sound like a commercial, but I confess that it might.

RIM announced its latest handheld device, the BlackBerry Bold. We can expect to see this new smartphone this summer. While the corporate customer is RIM’s target market for now, the added features to the BlackBerry Bold may help extend RIM’s reach into the consumer market as well. The new BlackBerry Bold will have “the most vivid display ever on a BlackBerry, a 2-megapixel camera with video recording capability and a media player for watching movies and managing music collections.” To be more descriptive, “the enhanced display” will be “twice the resolution of the Curve. The half-VGA color LCD is ‘fused’ to the undersurface of the device lens, which RIM says, improves definition and clarity.” Further the new BlackBerry Bold is “Sleek, shiny and sharp in design” and comes with “a newly designed full QWERTY keyboard, integrated GPS and 802.11 Wi-Fi. In addition, the unit has a 624MHz mobile processor for faster document downloading and support for triband HSDPA networks.” The more consumer-friendly features of this new device puts Apple’s iPhone squarely in its crosshairs. Read all about these new features in the article as reported by Reuters in the Internetnews.com post A Bold New BlackBerry for Business and also Judy Mottl’s article BlackBerry Goes Bold for Market Gold.

Continuing with this flurry of announcements, as I explained in my post of May 8, 2008, SAP Sapphire 2008, SAP will be integrating its CRM functionality into the BlackBerry with an aim at integrating all the functionality of the SAP software suite in the near future. This announcement was quickly followed by Microsoft announcing that it will make available Windows Live service on the RIM device as well. Users will now have available Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail. If this wasn’t enough, IBM announced that it is making the BlackBerry the only handheld enterprise device to have full mobile access to all Lotus collaboration solutions which includes Lotus Notes and Sametime. Users will now be able to collaborate across documents. “With the Lotus Collaboration Software suite, enterprises also gain access to IBM WebSphere Portal technology. The IBM dashboards software lets businesses build Web sites and single screen dashboard views that deliver information, applications and processes personalized to the individual BlackBerry user.” Judy Mottl reports this and more in her article IBM Lotus Goes Mobile Via The BlackBerry.

And if you aren’t out of breath yet from all these announcements, I’ve got one more. Mottl reports further that the BlackBerry will carry the RSA software in her article BlackBerry Becomes Security Token Device. With this new technology from RSA, the BlackBerry will be able to function much like a key fab security token. “The software generates a one-time passcode that users copy and paste to log in to corporate VPNs, enterprise wireless networks or network applications.” This technology will give greater security for network connectivity. As Mottl points out, such a need for this type of security for our mobile devices was magnified when several White House staffers’ Blackberries went missing during a recent visit from the President of Mexico.

That’s all I have for you now. But ask yourselves, with all this new functionality will we really be making the technology work for us or will we be working more because of the technology. At this point I am not certain.

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As many of you may know already May 4th to 7th was Sapphire 2008. This year it was held in Orlando, Florida. What is Sapphire? Well, it is SAP’s annual international customer conference. It is the place where the enterprise’s decision makers come to see the latest business solutions that SAP has to offer. There are a plethora of announcements and it is difficult to keep all the facts and details straight in one’s mind. I have listed below what I found to be a few of the more noteworthy announcements with a brief summary and if any of these are of interest follow the links for more details.

First on the list was the pre-conference announcement. My guess is that this was sort of a primer for things to come. The “mobile workforce”, many of whom are users of the ever popular hand-held device from Research in Motion (“RIM”) known as the Blackberry, may be interested to know that they will have access SAP’s CRM functionality in the coming months. The plans are to eventually integrate the rest of SAP’s functionality into the handheld device. As a Blackberry user myself, I think the implications of this could be enormous. Just the mere fact of being able to send and receive my emails wherever I happen to be is a huge advantage to me. SAP and RIM are talking about a mobile workforce now with access to all parts of the enterprise including order applications and inventory management. A more detailed description can be found in the Internews.com article SAP Is Wooing the BlackBerry CRM Crowd.

The next announcement I found to be of interest was that Rimini Street, the low-cost third-party provider of support, will be providing support for the SAP R/3 ERP suite. The concerns about SAP pulling support for its older versions was alleviated a bit when Rimini Street pledged to continue supporting the older versions without any upgrades until the year 2020. The cost savings for the R/3 user base could be significant. SAP had recently announced that it would raise its maintenance fees from 17% to 22% to keep up with the industry standard, particularly Oracle. Now with the availability of support from Rimini Street, CEO Seth Ravin, boosts, “Most of our customers are saving on average 70 percent against overall maintenance costs and at least 50 percent on their annual maintenance bill. We cut customers' costs in half and still make a very hefty profit." Ravin’s approach is that R/3 users don’t want to move to the next platform since “they spent years and a ton of money to get it working right and,…there's nothing that justifies the cost of upgrade, disruption and opportunity cost…” To read more see Rimini Street Adds SAP, Passes on TomorrowNow.

Following the Rimini support announcement, SAP made another announcement concerning its own Enterprise Support. This new approach to support from SAP will be more of a holistic approach and not the usual patches sent to fix bugs in the software. SAP will be supporting SAP solutions as well as non-SAP solutions and focus its attention on SOA. To learn more about the components of this Enterprise Support offering from SAP read SAP Beef’s Up Enterprise Support. This article also contains Oracle’s perspective on SAP’s offering and how it competes with SAP.

The last announcement coming out of Sapphire 2008 that I will discuss are the two add-ons that will assist in the design and execution of new business processes without the need for new code development, SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management (BPM) and SAP NetWeaver Business Rules Management. With close to 39,000 NetWeaver deployments, these new add-ons continue to emphasize SAP’s push into SOA. SAP's NetWeaver BPM will provide the ability to implement and manage complex business processes. In essence it simplifies the implementation of an SOA environment. As stated in SAP Add-Ons Aim to Simplify BPM for NewWeaver, “NetWeaver BPM's unified modeling capabilities mean that a single version of a business process will be available throughout an enterprise, and its users will be able to edit it and make changes without losing details in translation.”

The above discussion is only a sample of the announcements that came out of Sapphire 2008.

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