RIM

As you may have heard, Rockstar has filed its first set of lawsuits using the vast Nortel patent portfolio. Rockstar is the legal entity created by Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony to buy the Nortel patents. They outbid Google to the sum of $4.5B to buy a large set of core patents in the telecommunications space. The patents were far ranging as Nortel had limited the distribution of patents in business sales to those that were only used in that business. So all the general and valuable cross-portfolio patents were held by Nortel to the end and sold to Rockstar.

This premise might seem like a bit of a stretch for our readers here at UCStrategies, but just bear with me for five minutes. We're all seeing constant change in this space, and when it comes to disruption, these days, I don't see how you can rule anything out. Just when you thought the UC world was starting to make sense, something entirely new comes in from left field.

Research In Motion confirmed on Friday that it had restored service to millions of Blackberry users. During the three-hour service outage, the company said in a statement, "Some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa are experiencing issues with their BlackBerry service... All relevant support teams are working to resolve the issue. We apologize to any customers who may be affected." Despite this, RIM did not offer an explanation for the outage.

Research In Motion (RIM) announced its plans to provide Blackberry Mobile Voice System 5 with voice over Wi-Fi calling for a wider range of corporate phone and unified communication systems, including the Avaya Aura 6.1, Avaya CS1000 Communication Server, and Nortel Communication Server. It's also been re-architected, allowing it to better extend to third-party applications and phones.

Enterprise Connect (EC) has just wrapped up in Orlando, and while the main focus was on UC, collaboration, and video, mobility was extended its customary lip service. For those who relish irony, in his keynote address Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate VP, Office Business Productivity Group at Microsoft said that mobility was at the top of their list of priorities. In the meantime, Microsoft once again declined our invitation to participate in any of the mobility sessions.

IBM ran their annual Lotusphere conference last week, drawing thousands of customers and developers from around the world. As a first time attendee, I was absolutely blown away by the scale and the truly top notch manner in which the event was run. The main theme was introduced by Alistair Rennie, General Manager for Lotus Software and Collaboration Solutions as "Get Social. Do Business," so IBM has clearly placed a stake in the ground to capitalize on their advantage in social networking.

At the Blackberry Developer Conference, DEVCON 2010, Research in Motion (RIM) made several announcements, unveiling the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and associated OS, as well as introducing the BlackBerry Enterprise Application Middleware development platform.