RIM Meeting Notes

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Floyd Groce, Bob Alderman and I met with Howie Wheeler and Anthony LeBlanc of Research In Motion yesterday afternoon. The original intent of the meeting was to discuss Enterprise Licensing. We did, at times, digress into some technical discussions with Anthony.

The new Tachyon device will be called the RIM 5810. It will be commercially available within the next 2 to 3 weeks. The initial carrier will be VoiceStream. Howie and Anthony both thought it would be beneficial to have VoiceStream in to meet Mr. Porter and also to hear their "pitch" with respect to handheld devices like the RIM 5810. If this is the case, we can also query them about their intentions of supporting the Motorola Accompli 009.

Cingular is now a reseller of the RIM 957 devices. In fact, Anthony mentioned on more than one occasion that Cingular was the preferred provider/reseller. He always prefaced his comments with the standard disclaimer "of course I cannot tell the Government with reseller to purchase from, but ...". Howie was going to initiate getting Cingular into the DONCIO offices. One interesting thing mentioned was that once our initial yearly air time (of existing RIM 957 devices) commitment was completed with GTSI (for existing devices) we could move the service over to Cingular. Cingular will do monthly billing and they have a successful history of managing air time and devices. The same cannot be said of GTSI.

A new version of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) is due out in a few weeks. This will be version 2.5. The most notable difference is the inclusion of a proxy server. This will essentially replace the existing AvantGo infrastructure. This of course implies a new device client which will include an HTML browser. Good thing we got a free year of air time from AvantGo. We need to think of a way to disengage with AvantGo because they now bring nothing exclusive to the table.

RIM and EDS have been engaged in discussions related to NMCI. Howie has stated the RIM 957 devices will be a CLIN item beginning 18-FEB-2002. Of interest here is the fact that EDS has not yet chosen the carrier to be used. EDS and MCI WorldCom are teamed on NMCI, but EDS is leaning towards using Cingular directly if they can figure out how to accomplish this from a legal perspective.

-- Anonymous, February 15, 2002


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