RIM is wounded, and predators are starting to pick up the scent.
RIM has attracted the attention of IBM, which may be interested in buying RIM’s Enterprise Services unit, a pair of sources told Bloomberg.
Enterprise Services is RIM’s bread-and-butter. The link between BlackBerry devices and the software that manages them, the unit generated at least $4.1 billion in revenue last year. It would take a pretty compelling offer from IBM for RIM to part with the unit — which is why the sale seems so unlikely.
(And if you doubt the importance of that $4.1 billion number, consider that it’s almost the exact value of RIM’s recent market cap estimates. So, yeah — Enterprise Services is pretty important.)
RIM, naturally, isn’t saying much about the report. ”We don’t comment on rumors and speculation,” Nick Manning, a company spokesman, told VentureBeat this morning. IBM also gave a “no comment” on the rumors.
While there’s very little to go on in the report, we do know that RIM CEO Thorstein Heins is extremely unlikely to go for the deal like this — at least at this point. Right now RIM is more interested in seeing how well its BlackBerry 10 devices do next year, so don’t expect any high-profile sells anytime soon.
This article originally appeared on VentureBeat
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