GEMA and RIM to Jointly Drive Multinational Mobile Device Management

The Global Enterprise Mobility Alliance (GEMA) and Research In Motion (RIM) have reached an agreement to jointly deliver global managed mobility solutions for multinational customers. The new deal will leverage both RIM’s BlackBerry Mobile Fusion mobile device management (MDM) platform and support through global managed mobility services from GEMA members. The core idea behind the new alliance is that it will provide enterprise customers will have a global and consistent approach to service delivery and technical expertise. Mobile Fusion supports the upcoming BlackBerry 10, iOS and Android devices.

GEMA is currently made up of seven members that collectively span most modern global regions:

• Berkley Technical Services Limited (UK and Ireland)
• Emitac Mobile Solutions, LLC (Middle East, Africa, CIS, and Eastern Europe)
• GPXS Services BVBA (The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and France)
• MSC Mobility Pty Ltd (Australia and New Zealand)
• Mobi All Technologia S.A. (Latin America)
• SCHIFFL GmbH & Co. KG (Germany, Austria and Switzerland)
• ox Mobile Inc. (US and Canada)

Multinational organizations today are looking for transparent and seamless services for the deployment, support and management of their mobile workforce. GEMA's core offerings of Assist, Deploy Command, and Advise enable organizations to scale globally while receiving local in-country support where they operate around the world. GEMA members provide mobile device management solutions from most leading providers though the new deal with RIM will likely help BlackBerry Mobile Fusion score more visibility. GEMA's Advice, Assist, Deploy, and Command products support all major smartphone and tablet platforms around the world in dozens of languages.

The seven core GEMA organizations are also each Elite members of the BlackBerry Alliance Program, and clearly know their way around RIM’s entire enterprise infrastructure platform and capabilities. They should provide RIM with some “reach” for RIM’s enterprise tools, chief among them Mobile Fusion. GEMA is currently in discussions with other members of the BlackBerry Alliance Program that are interested in joining GEMA and the global initiative with RIM. The more of these partners RIM can pull together the better for RIM.

Multinational customers such as those GEMA caters to are typically faced with complex multiplatform mobile environments, which heighten the challenges that come with BYOD strategies. Global workforces also require that both information and applications needed to serve their customers remain highly secure, especially as it relates to smartphones and tablets – which can put a great deal of sensitive enterprise data – including personal customer data – in harm’s way if not properly secured and managed.

GEMA’s members will offer BlackBerry Mobile Fusion as a managed service to deliver a cost-efficient, secure, reliable and scalable solution. Mobile Fusion itself provides the following capabilities:

• Mobile Device Management and administration for BlackBerry, iOS, and Android smartphones and tablets.
• The ability to push mandatory applications and updates to BlackBerry users and alerts to iOS and Android users of required applications.
• BlackBerry Balance technology, a feature of BlackBerry smartphones and BlackBerry PlayBook tablets, that enables customers to use their devices for both work and personal purposes by keeping business information and applications highly secure and separate from personal information.

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion will prepare organizations for a simple and straightforward upgrade to BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, which will launch with the first BlackBerry 10 devices sometime in 2013. BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 is designed to integrate with existing BlackBerry Enterprise Server deployments and to manage BlackBerry 7 OS and earlier smartphones. RIM believes that it is the ideal platform from which to manage BlackBerry 10 devices and BlackBerry PlayBook tablets, as well as iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. It will do so from a single, unified Web-based console.

Kris Snyder, CEO of Vox Mobile and chair of the GEMA Steering Group noted, "Each of the GEMA members has built their business on the market and technologies created by RIM. We are each very proud to be able to work closely with RIM and support our customers in the next phase in the evolution of enterprise mobility. The BlackBerry solution offers a consistently high level of security, reliability, and manageability for customers around the globe, which is uniquely matched by the consistently high level of global service GEMA provides our customers."

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