RIM co-CEOs Resign: Is This the Cost of Downtime?

Back in October I commented in this blog about the enormous RIM BlackBerry outage [source]. I wrote that "even a massive outage like this is unlikely to cause the demise of a large and important firm, but combined with other woes like a less-than-competitive product and poor business model it could well be the deciding factor."

And now for the fallout. RIM is still in business, but its beleaguered co-CEOs/co-Chairmen Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis have resigned and taken other positions within the company [source]. I'm sure it was not the outage alone (or all RIM outages put together) that caused this leadership shakeup. But it could well have been the deciding factor.

Outages and CEO Job Security

RIM's product problems are certainly serious. But I see a fundamental difference between 1) the prescience needed to get the right product to market at the right time, and 2) the technical ability to keep an existing product up and running. Customers might to some degree forgive a company whose product is reliable but behind the times. They will abandon if it doesn't work when they need it even if it is the newest, slickest thing around.

The October outage has RIM "facing a possible class action lawsuit in Canada" [source]. Add the cost of that in addition to the costs of recovery, customer abandonment, shareholder value and so forth. (Stay tuned; I will be commenting on the legal issues around cloud outages in the next few days.)

To put RIM's decline in perspective, the company was worth $70 billion a few years ago but today has a market value of about $8.9 billion [source]. Their stock dropped about 75% last year and was down to $16.28 before the market opened on Monday January 23, 2012 [source].

So according to the rules of modern business, someone has to pay and in this case it is the CEOs.

Now Imagine This at a Smaller Company

Can you imagine a three-day outage at a smaller software company? Or even a one-day outage? Imagine a typical e-commerce technology provider with 50 retail customers, 100 employees, and an SaaS application. If the core application, image server, database server, customer care system, inventory system, orders & fulfillment system, or other key element goes down that could be the end of them. Many smaller companies do not survive a significant downtime event. And many smaller retailers do not survive if they are unable to do business on a key shopping day such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

Or even if the email system goes down for a couple hours. It happens all the time. Email is a key element of workflow and productivity and what company can afford to sit still for even a couple hours?

It's more than the CEO whose job is at risk. Here's where an ounce of prevention is worth far more than a pound of cure.

That Rickety Old Failover

Remember my earlier comment about outdated yet reliable products, versus outdated and unreliable products? Ironically, the failover disaster recovery model that failed RIM back in October is one of those old and unreliable products. It was designed for systems and architectures that no longer bear any resemblance to what businesses are actually using. If failover worked I would not be writing this because there would be no need for its replacement.

But if you want to find out about real business continuity and getting away from failover, take a look at ZeroNines. Our Always Available™ architecture processes in multiple cloud locations, on multiple servers, and in multiple nodes. There is no hierarchy so if one goes down the others continue processing all network transactions. ZeroNines can bring application uptime to virtually 100%. It is a complete departure from the failover that RIM is using, and that small businesses everywhere stake their futures upon.

Time Will Tell

"RIM earned its reputation by focusing relentlessly on the customer and delivering unique mobile communications solutions… We intend to build on this heritage to expand BlackBerry's leadership position," RIM's new CEO Thorsten Heins is quoted as saying [source].

Let's hope this "focus on the customer" also includes a strategic initiative to build genuine uptime and availability, or maybe we'll be reading about another new RIM CEO next January.

Visit the ZeroNines website to find out more about how our disaster-proof architecture protects businesses of any description from downtime.

Alan Gin – Founder & CEO, ZeroNines