[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Featured keynote speakers included John T Chambers, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer from Cisco, Meg Whitman, President and Chief Executive Officer from Hewlett-Packard, and General Colin Powell, Retired U.S. General.

RIM held a number of information sessions to highlight the upcoming launch of BlackBerry 10. Featured speakers included Jeff Holleran, Senior Director of Enterprise Product Management and Vivek Bhardwaj, Head of Software Portfolio. Throughout his session, Jeff talked to over 100 Gartner session attendees about the future of the mobile enterprise, which requires a unified solution that gives employees access to the information they need, without compromise. Jeff’s session shed light on what’s in store for BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, RIM’s enterprise mobility management solution. Representing the Enterprise Business Unit, Jeff explained how “BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 supports a heterogeneous mobile environment with greater security, flexibility, cost-savings, and manageability.”

Following Jeff’s engaging presentation, Vivek Bhardwaj, Head of Software Portfolio, shared an overview of the BlackBerry 10 experience with over 200 session attendees. By demonstrating the BlackBerry 10 features and functionality in action, Vivek captivated the audience with a series of live demos. Vivek also expertly balanced the end user perspective from both a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) consumerization mindset, and a management perspective targeted to the CIO’s and IT decision makers in attendance.

In addition to two BlackBerry 10 focused information sessions from RIM leadership, a BlackBerry booth was set up on the 2012 Gartner Symposium/ITxpo show floor to demonstrate the various BlackBerry product and service offerings available in the North American market today. Visitors to the BlackBerry show floor booth were able to learn more about BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, RIM’s mobile device management solution for BlackBerry, iOS and Android devices, BlackBerry PlayBook and the BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone. A “cell spa” was also set up as a service to attendees. BlackBerry staff were on hand to charge BlackBerry, iOS and Android device batteries and freshen up smartphone display screens at the cell spa for conference attendees.

Were you in attendance at the 2012 Gartner Symposium/ITxpo? If you were able to listen to our BlackBerry information sessions or visit us on the show floor, let us know what you thought by commenting below!

Lisa is a Senior Marketing Manager for Enterprise Programs at Research In Motion® (RIM), which means she focuses on marketing activities to engage and educate the decision makers (IT and otherwise) at large organizations. Having worked with her in the past on numerous whitepapers and events, it was my pleasure to grab a coffee and chat with her about the upcoming Gartner’s IT Symposium / ITxpo 2010 in Orlando, Florida, October 17-22nd.

Lisa, once again RIM’s participating in Gartner’s expo…can you explain this event a bit more for those who may not be familiar?

Gartner ITxpo is one of the IT industry’s largest gathering of CIOs and senior IT professionals. The event is hosted by the Gartner analyst firm and encompasses over 350 sessions, workshops, how-to clinics, roundtables, exhibitor displays and more.

Will you be focusing on any particular BlackBerry® smartphone technologies this year?

This year it’s all about extending the platform. We will be featuring BlackBerry® Mobile Voice System 5.0 and Chalk Pushcast software. Additionally, there is a strong emphasis on Applications – Super Apps and Enterprise solutions in particular. For the first time at this event, we’ll be featuring partners in a BlackBerry Partner Pavilion. The companies that are participating either have pre-built enterprise applications or have the tools and expertise to help mobilize in-house applications. We’re very excited for attendees to meet with these experienced partners who offer numerous solutions: on the fly troubleshooting, protecting confidential calls, internal/external collaboration tools, and so on.

Can you tell me a bit about the BlackBerry Partner Pavilion?

Sure! The Partner Pavilion is a place for attendees to check out a variety of different BlackBerry Enterprise applications. We’ll have representatives from the following partners at the show to answer any questions:

• GWAVA – Retention/eDiscovery for PIN, SMS, Messenger text messages and phone data. Integrates with any email archive solution. No software on the devices. No additional hardware required.
• CONCEIVIUM Business Solutions – CONCEIVIUM is a leading technology company[true?] delivering innovative mobile infrastructure and device management products as well as priority messaging solutions for organizations around the world.
• Cellcrypt – Cellcrypt encrypts voice calls on BlackBerry smartphones, helping to ensure conversations remain confidential. Cellcrypt’s easy-to-use software provides government-grade security (FIPS 140-2) over cellular, Wi-Fi® and satellite networks.
• Zenprise – Zenprise Mobile Manager monitors, manages, and secures enterprise BlackBerry smartphones and will provision, monitor, troubleshoot, secure and run real-time reports across a distributed BlackBerry® Enterprise Server environment from a central dashboard.
• DragonRAD – DragonRAD is a mobility platform for building, deploying, managing, and securing mobile enterprise applications across all BlackBerry smartphones.
• Boxtone – Via a single unified console, BoxTone software delivers proactive management, monitoring, support and security of mobile users, devices, platforms and applications across the entire mobile lifecycle.
• IBM Lotus Software – Experience highly secure enterprise social networking capabilities and a highly secure framework for document-based collaboration on a BlackBerry smartphone.
• Vox Mobile – Vox Mobile specializes in Mobile Technology Management. Their services are segmented into Mobile Platform Services, Mobile Managed Services, and Mobile Engineering.
• Xobni Mobile – Xobni Mobile gives users effortless address book management. Automatically create profiles for everyone, ranked by importance and using lightning-fast search by name or company.

This year there is a unique way that attendees can interact with RIM – can you tell me a bit about that?

Our Customer Insights team will be on site doing in-depth customer interviews. This is an opportunity for you to tell us what you think about our products, services, partners, and more. RIM is committed to continually improving the customer experience and we value our customer’s opinions. If you are attending Gartner ITxpo we’d love to see you (visit RIM and our partners in booth #1200!), and if you’re interested in speaking with our Insights team, you can contact us to arrange an interview time.

Thanks Lisa, it certainly sounds like another great program, and hopefully customers will have a chance to meet you in person if they’re attending.