We recently had an event with our 
Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) where we were down for the better part of a day. Turns out it was corrupt MAPI profile, causing an inability of the BES to interact with the Exchange mailbox store. The fix was simple, delete some registry entries and recreate the profile, but a considerable amount of time was spent tracking down a very uncommon and obscure problem.
This got me thinking, what was the cost of this outage to our business? Being a sales organization, this could range from nothing more than an inconvenience up to causing us to lose a major deal or major account. Of course this question is impossible to answer, and very difficult to approximate, but it’s not hard to imagine a situation where this could have been a very costly outage.
So why do we have a BES? It’s more expensive, it’s an additional point of failure, it takes additional time to manage, and we don’t use any of the features it provides beyond what ActiveSync does (Remote wipe, Enterprise apps, IT policies, etc). While the BlackBerry was far and away the best device to receive enterprise email on, its competitors have come a long way in the past few years. I have a blackberry and I like the device, but I don’t think it’s a better device than what Apple has with the new iPhone, or some of the new Android phones. So I decided to find out how much more supporting a Blackberry device was, compared to supporting an ActiveSync compatible phone.
Most of our users are on Verizon, so I used numbers from Verizon for comparison. This is based on the phones having a two year refresh cycle and a new two year contract.
| Blackberry | ActiveSync Phone | ||
| Basic Phone | $20 (8830) | $0 (Palm Pixi or Samsung Saga) | |
| Plan (450 min, Unlimited Data, Exchange Access) | $85/mo * 24 mo = $2,040 | $70/mo * 24 mo = $1,680 | |
| Blackberry Enterprise server support | $500/year = $500/8 users = $62 /user/year | $0 | |
| Two year reoccurring cost per user | $2,184 | $1,680 | |
By my quick calculations that’s a $500 per user premium for two years of service, or $250 per year per user. Now that’s not much money for a business, but I believe that’s only a small part of the total cost. When you factor in how much time our administrator has spent managing the BES server (updates, service packs, version upgrades, troubleshooting) and the additional burden in related tasks (upgrading Exchange), plus the additional downtime we’ve experience on the BES, I would imagine the cost per user is significantly higher. This also does not include MS Windows licensing, hardware, power and cooling (our BES lives in a VM, reducing our costs).
Of course the situation can vary dramatically from our organization to another, especially if the enterprise features of BES are leveraged. I don’t think the BlackBerry makes our users any more productive over another Smartphone, and it certainly adds hard costs and soft costs to our IT infrastructure. My recommendation to management will be to begin to phase out the BES as employee contracts expire.
Disagree with me or my numbers? Please post below.