HP and RIM team up for BlackBerry business deal

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Computing giants HP and RIM have formed a strategic alliance.

A closeup of two people wearing suits shaking hands

HP and RIM have proved the rumour mongers true by partnering up to offer new BlackBerry business solutions.

Last month, the two companies were tipped to work together at the beginning of this month and today they officially confirmed the new alliance.

As part of the union, the two will create new solutions aimed at increasing organisations' productivity, service levels and cost reduction, in addition to supporting BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.

"RIM and HP are working together to deliver solutions to customers that weave mobility into their daily operations from innovative new services in the cloud to managed mobile services for the enterprise," said Jim Balsillie, RIM's co-chief executive. "Through our collaboration with HP, businesses will have access to an expanded set of applications and services for their BlackBerry smartphone deployments."

The two companies will be using this week's Wireless Enterprise Symposium to demonstrate two BlackBerry-based products: The web-based HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry smartphones and management tool HP Operations Manager for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Earlier this year, RIM made the bold statement that it believes BlackBerry devices could replace desk-based phones and prove a real contender for PC-based IP telephony too.

Maggie Holland
Maggie Holland

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.

Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.