The BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900/9930, BlackBerry® Torch™ 9810, and BlackBerry Torch 9850 smartphones are now supported by MVS 5.1, which allows businesses to extend their phone system to their mobile workforce. By enabling “Voice over Wi-Fi®” or “Voice over Mobile” calling on the leading business phone systems from Cisco®, Mitel, and Avaya®, BlackBerry MVS was designed to extend the functionality and capability of a desk phone to a BlackBerry® smartphone virtually anywhere in the world. Now employees can be reached in the office or on the road through a single phone number, reducing the likelihood of missed calls. Even when a call is routed to voicemail, end users will have a single voicemail account to manage. Calls can be routed securely over Wi-Fi when available, in order to help reduce a company’s overall telecom costs. Lastly, the handoff is automatic – calls are seamlessly transferred between Wi-Fi and mobile networks without interruption. (You can learn more about BlackBerry MVS from our previous blog post on the launch of version 5.1.)

New expanded support for the AudioCodes Mediant 3000 VoIP gateway allows businesses that operate the Avaya® Communication Manager and Nortel® Communication Server phone systems to take advantage of BlackBerry MVS. In addition to supporting the AudioCodes Mediant 1000 and 2000 series VoIP gateways, BlackBerry MVS also supports the Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Mitel® Communications Director phone systems. Designed to encompass most widely used VoIP and phone systems, BlackBerry MVS has your business covered.

BlackBerry MVS 5.1 is just one component of RIM’s Unified Communications & Collaboration portfolio, joining BlackBerry® Mobile Conferencing, BlackBerry® Client for Microsoft® SharePoint®, BlackBerry® Chalk™ Pushcast™ Software, and BlackBerry Enterprise Instant Messaging in providing a comprehensive suite of voice and collaboration solutions that are managed through the BlackBerry® Enterprise Server platform.

We’re excited about the new support for AudioCodes® and BlackBerry 7 OS devices, as well as wider availability. BlackBerry MVS is now available through Research In Motion® (RIM®) distribution partners in over 25 countries including the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Australia and Mexico. To learn more about BlackBerry MVS features or to contact a reseller, head over to www.blackberry.com/mvs.

Question: How often do you miss calls to your desk phone in any given week, and how could BlackBerry MVS help you? Share in the comments 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.