Friday, January 28, 2011

No BlackBerry Corporate Email Access for Indian Government

Will India carry out their threat to ban BlackBerry smartphone if Research In Motion doesn’t give their government access to BlackBerry Enterprise Server? Well we may soon find out as RIM say they can’t give access to corporate email.

According to an article over on Techtree and by way of the Wall Street journal, the Blackberry maker has stated they are unable to deliver access to their BlackBerry Enterprise Server to the Indian government.

The vice president for industry, government and university relations for RIM, Robert Shaw has said… “We can’t give a solution for enterprise services [corporate email]. It’s not possible to do so, because the keys of that service are with the corporate enterprises and corporate entity that owns the server.”

Research In Motion recently bowed down to the government of India demands by allowing access to BlackBerry Messenger as previously reported (here) but this was due to BlackBerry user conversations are hosted by RIM servers themselves.

Apparently Crow will meet with Indian officials over the coming days to thrash out a solution to the issue, however apparently India’s federal Ministry for Home Affairs has thus far not commented. So will India ban BlackBerry or will they back down over BES, only time will tell.