Yeah, it caught my eye, too: RIM has come out and said the Blackberry can replace the desk phone.Here's the key paragraph from the linked article:
At a media briefing ahead of Mobile World Congress, Research in Motion said that it is in talks with a number of mobile operators in Europe, with a view to launching MVS-based services that would allow companies to use BlackBerry devices for internal, as well as external calls, and to give staff one single "enterprise" contact number for both.
The "MVS" cited is RIM's Mobile Voice System, which appears to be RIM's effort to fully converge the Blackberry platform with the Ascendent technology that RIM acquired a few years ago. Here's a key passage from RIM's description of MVS:
BlackBerry MVS also gives IT administrators the control to set voice policies on the BlackBerry smartphone, so that inbound and outbound calls use the enterprise line. This allows for all mobile calls to be logged or recorded for compliance with regulatory or corporate standards.
That capability would not only allow for the logging function that RIM describes, it would also seem to be able to do something that, I noted a couple of weeks ago, current mobile systems can't do: Keep the mobile user's presence status current on the enterprise system. In an un-integrated system, a mobile phone user dials out through the public cellular network, and this call is invisible to the enterprise presence engine. MVS would see these calls and be able to pass the presence status to the enterprise presence server.
Some other key elements from the article include the fact that MVS uses the cellular data channel to connect to the PBX, and because it doesn't use VOIP, MVS works with either TDM or IP PBXs. And they cite a RIM customer that claimed an ROI of four months with the new capability.
Here's the money quote from RIM's representative from the linked article:
"We are now able to replace desk phones with smart phones," said David Heit, senior product manager at RIM. "For users who are seldom at their desks, why have a desktop phone, when one device can do it all?"
Update: This kind of thing has got to make RIM execs smile, too, when they contemplate battling the iPhone for the serious mobile businessperson.
