From the rumor mill: BGR is reporting that RIM is set to make a major announcement Tuesday at MWC in Barcelona. According to Boy Genius' sources, RIM will launch "BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express," a free and unlimited new version of their BES Enterprise Server service. Earlier this week, an update from Brightpoint's twitter account also alerted folks to look out for a big announcement from RIM at MWC.
The idea here seems to be that RIM will start offering Enterprise-grade services to BIS (Individual, non-Enterprise) customers. In essence this would eliminate the need for most (all? can't be all?) BBerry users to pay extra for a BES data plan. Any of you who've recently signed up for BlackBerry data service know that Individual BIS data runs a good 20 bucks or so cheaper each month than an Enterprise-grade BES plan.
There may be more to Tuesday's rumored announcement, as well. One possibility is a BlackBerry Shield-type service for BIS users. The new service would reside in the cloud and offer security features like syncing, remote wipe, wireless backups, and so on. A move like this would clearly be aimed at enticing small business owners/users into the BlackBerry fold by offering Enterprise-grade security at no additional cost. RIM needs some unique value-add propositions of this sort to try to gain back some of the market share they've recently been losing to the likes of Apple and Google.
Finally getting that new Webkit-based browser onto BlackBerry devices wouldn't hurt, either.
