RIM Makes Ascendent Buy

Research In Motion (RIM) has made an acquisition in what might be considered a positive change of pace for the maker of the popular
Blackberry.

The company bought Ascendent Systems, a
provider of voice mobility solutions for the enterprise. Terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

Ascendent makes the
Ascendent Voice Mobility Suite (AVMS), standards-based software that
integrates with existing PBX and IP-PBX telephony systems to “push” voice
calls and extend desk phone functionality to mobile users on their wireless
handsets, or any wireline phone.

RIM expects AVMS to complement its BlackBerry Enterprise offering,
enabling RIM to provide customers additional wireless communications
capabilities to their voice and data solution.

Potential customers include
businesses with multiple locations or those in a campus environment, or
organizations with a large number of mobile workers, executives, salespeople
or field technicians who spend a significant amount of time away from their
desks, but need to be accessible.

RIM also announced the availability of BlackBerry Enterprise
Server version 4.1 and BlackBerry Enterprise Server — Small Business
Edition v4.1 for Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino.

The company said this latest release is designed to make it easier to
manage large-scale BlackBerry deployments across the enterprise.

The new
BlackBerry Enterprise server also integrates with enterprise IM
systems, including Microsoft Windows Messenger, Live Communications
Server 2005 and Lotus Sametime.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1 supports the new Mobile Data System
4.1 (MDS) application development environment, which includes
BlackBerry MDS Studio, a new visual development tool for creating mobile
applications based on Web services.

For months, most of the media coverage RIM received has been
about its long-running patent dispute with NTP, which culminated in a $612.5 million settlement.