IBM seeking to acquire RIM's enterprise services?

On Thursday, the old rumor about Samsung buying RIM was once again floated, and once again shot down. But later in the day, speculation about another deal started to make the rounds. According to a pair of anonymous insiders, IBM has approached RIM about buying its enterprise services business. This is the division that runs secure servers for corporate communication and recently was in the news when India demanded the encryption codes from RIM. The Canadian based manufacturer doesn't have the codes because the messages pass through RIM's servers encrypted and are decoded when the recipient receives the message. IBM spokesman James Sciales and RM spokesman Nick Manning both had no comment.

Big Blue's approach to RIM was characterized as being "informal" and since no company has made a legitimate offer to buy the entire company, or the division that manufacturers handsets and tablets, RIM is likely to wait out the launch of its BlackBerry 10 powered handsets early next year. Thus, no talks are in progress between RIM and IBM. BlackBerry 10 is the QNX based OS that BlackBerry is using for its next generation of handsets and when some slides and videos of the software were displayed at BlackBerry World in May, they created some excitement which has the company hopeful about the success of the rollout, which has been delayed until 2013.

RIM's share of the global smartphone market has plunged from 12% during last year's second quarter to 4.8% during this year's second quarter. The company has been unable to compete with the Apple iPhone and with Android devices using its current lineup.

source: Reuters