Concept for an exceptionally large-scale BES rollout....

[visceralberry]

What would be the very maximum number of BES users that a single company could have operational at any one time?

If for instance an organisation wanted to provide Blackberries for a large client-base, but still managed centrally, could you see a way for this to be reliably and cost-effectively carried-out if we are talking about 100,000+ users? What about if aiming for 1million+ users?

How many servers, BES licences, etc would be required (lets say per 10k users)?

I strongly believe there is a very strong case for RIM to gain significant traction with current OS7 and future QNXmobile devices, especially if certain BES-enabled features could be brought to large user bases of 100k+ at a time...

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and insights.

[limh5]

Very few companies have over 100,000 employees.

[RTakacs]

This sounds more like a sales call rather than a general enquiry.

[visceralberry]

Not sure why this can't just be answered as the straight question it is.

@RTakacs, Not sure how you mean this sounds like a sales call...

@limh5, I agree on that. There are very few firms with that number of staff, however my query is whether an independent company could provide a BES service to non-staff for the sole purpose of securely managing the devices on their behalf whilst providing BES-enabled services such as Blackberry MVS (referring to the unified communications systems available to the platform).

Any positive suggestions and insights that the forum's users can provide will be very helpful to this query.

[RTakacs]

The problem with saying that you'd want blackberrys being managed for up to 1 million people is the initial hardware & software cost to get a server farm up and running would be immense.
Not just the cost of the servers but the air conditioning, the switches and the power.

Theoretically it could be done but the cost involved would be huge.
Each server would have approx 750 users on. So that's 14 servers (well 13.333333333 but who cares) for 10,000 users. 14 servers at approx £1K minimum (yea, im from blighty) and that's without the cost of the blackberry licenses, or the initial setup cost or the air conditioning or the training or the staff to activate all those devices/advise user's on how to do it themselves.
You would need approx 1334 servers for 1 million users. That's £1,334,000 before blackberry licenses, air conditioning, switches, UPS', firewall, power or staff to maintain it all.
And as for maintaining the users and their mailboxes, i would suggest having each region/sub region in their own domain but in the same forest as eachother to keep things tiday and it would be silly to have the BES servers on their existing Exchange or domino servers, so that's another few boxes and another few for their domain controllers because you dont have everything on one box unless you really are wanting this project to get 1 million users onto BES to fail... Oh and i forgot about the building to house all of these boxes..... then you have to keep a backup of these servers for disaster recovery purposes, you can use either tape or straight to disk backups, what's the cost on those nowadays.


Can you see why it can't be answered as a simple question now....

[visceralberry]

Wow. Ok, I'm starting to see your point about it not being so straight forward. Thanks for providing such an in-depth description of the issues at hand, relating to this sort of project though.

I can imagine how this could become an IT headache if badly implemented, but potentially a very unique system if done correctly.

What industry are you involved in @RTakacs? Are you a Blackberry technician/implementer? The information given still seems intriguing given the concept I am considering, and it would be very interesting to be able to pick your mind about it if you wouldn't mind?

I will send you a PM/inbox.