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Comment by chime | Hacker News Reader

> One area that RIM/Blackberry is still king is the enterprise. Apple hasn't even attempted to enter this market, for good reason.

I setup hosted Exchange via RackSpace for my client (a Pharma manufacturer) and their managers/exec-team use iPhone to sync their email, calendar, and contacts. BES has lots of neat features but none of my users need anything beyond the basics that iPhone offers. I don't see any reason to switch from Apple to RIM products.

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That's because you're not running the business. BES is not about sync, it's about security, and for an enterprise, it is in a class of its own.

I recognize that not everyone (and virtually no one here on HN I'm sure) sees the things that BES offers as important, or even desirable, but I can tell you that there is a huge market for them.

BES is yet another piece of software to manage if you are a mail administrator, and it is a pretty complex beast at that. You can have just as secure a sync solution with straight iphone/exchange by using Exchange Activesync with a VPN client, and you don't have the overhead of managing a BES install.

I don't think you are understanding my point. Nobody gives a damn what the Mail Administrator thinks. The auditors see "BES" and move to the next item, they see your custom made solution and go "WTF is that? Not in the manual == Security Risk!!!11"

I've performed some of those audits, and that was not my response.

BES is something that IT wants. However, business users (generally) want iPhones and Android phones. Who do you think wins in the end, a cost center or the people who bring in the revenue?

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