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RESEARCH IN MOTION ANNUAL REPORT 2011 3
ticularly in international markets where our partners have strongly
embraced prepaid BlackBerry service oerings. The eciency of
the BlackBerry solution on both older and newer networks allows
our partners to oer economical pricing plans for the messaging and
social networking applications that matter most to end users. Oer-
ings such as BlackBerry® Internet Service Social plans, which deliver
unlimited BBM and social networking, are gathering momentum and
are helping drive growth around the world. These oerings have had
particular success in Asia Pacific and Latin America, and they are
beginning to be adopted more broadly in Western Europe and North
America as well.
Enterprise Leadership
The phenomenal success of the BlackBerry solution began in the
enterprise market and this segment remains important to RIM’s
growth strategy for the future. The unique security architecture of
the BlackBerry platform is valued by corporations and governments
around the world and continues to stand out in the marketplace.
In fact, the UK’s National Technical Authority for Information
Assurance (known as CESG) confirmed in April of 2011 that the
BlackBerry Enterprise Solution is still the only smartphone system
approved for use with restricted data by Government departments
and organizations. We continue to enhance the BlackBerry solution
for enterprise customers and, in the past year, we added several
new platform extensions including BlackBerry Balance which allows
corporate IT departments to securely enable access to corporate
messaging and other corporate data from an employee’s personal
BlackBerry smartphone without imposing incremental costs on the
company. Corporate customers are also increasingly moving their IT
infrastructure to cloud-based architectures and RIM is in an excel-
lent position to benefit from this shift. The BlackBerry solution was
developed from the beginning as a cloud-based service and it is this
robust architecture that enables many competitive advantages for
the BlackBerry solution, including real-time push services, industry-
leading security and back-end integration with carrier provisioning
and billing systems. Over the coming year, RIM plans to further
leverage these strengths to grow our presence as a cloud-based
enterprise service provider through a variety of strategies including
partnerships with other leading suppliers of cloud-based solutions
such as Microsoft®. The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet also adds to
RIM’s portfolio of professional grade products and services and
establishes a new standard for tablets in the enterprise segment,
allowing organizations to leverage their existing BlackBerry solution
and the trusted BlackBerry security architecture when deploying
these productivity enhancing devices.
In addition to providing solutions for large enterprises, RIM is
also committed to helping small business professionals improve
communications and business productivity. Over the past year we
had strong adoption of BlackBerry® Enterprise Server Express and
we expect penetration in this market to continue as we leverage
oerings such as MDaemon Messaging Server – BlackBerry Edition,
BlackBerry® Protect, and BlackBerry Management Center, a cloud
services oering for small and medium-sized businesses.
Accelerating Consumer Adoption
Consumer adoption of BlackBerry smartphones continued to grow
over the past year as customers increasingly recognized the unique
value of the BlackBerry solution and more people made the switch
from feature phones to smartphones. Throughout the year, we
launched new consumer focused oerings to strengthen the mobile
experience, including the user friendly BlackBerry 6 and enhance-
ments to the BBM platform. As we move into the new fiscal year,
we believe the uncompromised user experience delivered by the
BlackBerry PlayBook tablet will also win over new consumers as they
see the benefits and advantages of the product. RIM has designed
the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet to be both professional grade and
consumer friendly since so many customers use mobile devices
for both work and personal purposes. The ultra portable BlackBerry
PlayBook tablet is a multitasking powerhouse that provides the per-
formance needed to properly deliver uncompromised web browsing
and stunning visuals for 3D gaming and High Definition video. The
incredible performance is a function of both the premium hardware
design choices RIM made for this important new product as well as
the underlying BlackBerry Tablet OS that is based on the POSIX cer-
tified QNX Neutrino microkernel from QNX Software Systems (which
RIM acquired last year). In addition to the BlackBerry PlayBook
tablet, we also have an exciting line-up of new smartphone oerings
on the roadmap for fiscal 2012 and more and more of the high-end
features of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet platform will be inte-
grated into BlackBerry smartphones over time. We have also been
Mike Lazaridis Jim Balsillie
President and Co-CEO Co-CEO