IT Group Urges Moratorium In BlackBerry ShutdownIT Group Urges Moratorium In BlackBerry Shutdown

With many of its more than 3,000 members anxious about a threatened shutdown of Research in Motion's Blackberry services, the Society of Information Management (SIM) is urging a six-month moratorium to give users an opportunity to implement alternative solutions.

"Even in the best of situations, we're looking at a few weeks," said Drew Farris, VP and CIO at Iron Age Corp., in an interview Wednesday. "It definitely could be weeks of downtime and it would be a fairly traumatic event for us."

Iron Age, which markets safety shoes, has more than 100 Blackberries in use and they are crucial to the firm's maintenance and support services. Although the 188-year-old firm operates many brick-and-mortar stores, it also has 100 mobile stores operating from trucks. With POS capability on the trucks and important maintenance and service requirements, Farris notes that Iron Age's customer base is very technology-savvy.

Farris says he has instituted a contingency plan to acquire Treo handhelds if U.S. District Court Judge James R. Spencer issues an order that could result in the shutdown of the Blackberry service. In complex patent litigation, Research in Motion lost a jury trial to patent trolling company NTP Inc., which seeks hundreds of millions of dollars from RIM.

Farris said the six-month moratorium sought by SIM should be enough time for IT managers to cope if RIM's service is required to be shutdown.

SIM prepared a filing for Judge Spencer, but no new arguments including SIM's were accepted. In the filing, SIM said: "A cease and desist injunction allowing fewer than six months for execution would render thousands of businesses unable to conduct business in the normal course. It would create a run on alternative products that the current marketplace cannot meet."

SIM member Ed Trainor, CIO at Paramount Pictures, said he would take a six-month period to test RIM's contingency plan. "In the unlikely event that RIM's workaround does not test well, the six-month period would also allow us time to move to an alternative solution," he said in an e-mail. "Our contingency plan is to rely on the RIM workaround solution."

SIM questioned whether a workaround by RIM to circumvent patent issues would be effective. "The efficacy of these 'workaround' measures are untested by IT personnel," SIM said in its prepared filing. "It is not clear how long implementation of these efforts would take and whether no disruption of business would result. The patchwork technology proposed by Blackberry may also force organizations to incur further costs."

Farris said he hasn't been able to test RIM's proposed workaround, although he added that he believes the alternative solution is being tested by some users.

As for Iron Age's contingency plan, Farris said the firm already has a small alternative structure in place that utilizes GoodLink technology and Treo handhelds. "We have arrangements to deliver a large number of Treos fairly quickly," he said. "We could definitely have weeks of downtime. The question is when do you pull the trigger."

Noting that Iron Age uses Blackberries for relatively simple e-mail communications, he said he sympathized with users who have built complex custom applications around their Blackberries. He cited hospital databases that are accessed by Blackberries as an example.

The SIM brief added: "SIM represents many mid- and small-cap firms such as a regional hospital organization in the Midwest or a small manufacturing firm in the MidAtlantic. Many of these regional organizations will not be able to secure replacement technologies in a short period of time."

Judge Spencer, who has urged RIM and NTP to settle their dispute, hasn't indicated exactly when he will issue his verdict, although most observers believe his decision will come soon.