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Analyst: BlackBerry service glitches ignite "concerns," but no harm done (yet)

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I've just been sent a copy of BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion stock analyst Mike Abramsky's brand new, quite detailed analysis on RIM. There's plenty to chew on in this RBC Capital Markets report. The first thing I wanted to know is Abramsky's take on what effect, if any, the Feb.11 BlackBerry service outage will have on RIM's business. Summary: the incident reignites "concerns," but wont effect sales of new BlackBerrys.

On Feb 11, RIM suffered a service disruption, leaving 8M BlackBerry users in the Americas without service for 3 hours, due to a problem with a system upgrade intended to increase capacity. The outage offers ST headline risk and reignites concerns over dependencies on RIM’s service, but is unlikely in our view to affect sales momentum (RIM’s last disruption was 10 months ago).

Abramsky then gives us some info on the Network Operations Center (NOC) where the outage occurred.

We est. RIM’s centralized NOC architecture now handles est. up to 1-2B emails per day (75-150 emails/day/user x 12M subs) or equivalent to 10%+ of global phone traffic, growing at 72% CAGR. The NOC also provides RIM with its competitive advantages -- push email, security, bandwidth efficiency, etc. and offloads overhead from internal email servers, which are often less reliable.

Hmm, quite a busy place. Apparently too busy to institute robust redundancies?

posted by Russell Shaw
February 19, 2008 @ 8:12 am

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