HP and RIM have proved the rumour mongers true by partnering up to offer new BlackBerry business solutions.
Last month, the two companies were tipped to work together at the beginning of this month and today they officially confirmed the new alliance.
As part of the union, the two will create new solutions aimed at increasing organisations' productivity, service levels and cost reduction, in addition to supporting BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.
"RIM and HP are working together to deliver solutions to customers that weave mobility into their daily operations from innovative new services in the cloud to managed mobile services for the enterprise," said Jim Balsillie, RIM's co-chief executive. "Through our collaboration with HP, businesses will have access to an expanded set of applications and services for their BlackBerry smartphone deployments."
The two companies will be using this week's Wireless Enterprise Symposium to demonstrate two BlackBerry-based products: The web-based HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry smartphones and management tool HP Operations Manager for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
Earlier this year, RIM made the bold statement that it believes BlackBerry devices could replace desk-based phones and prove a real contender for PC-based IP telephony too.
