BlackBerry developer expands in Atlanta - Kansas City Business Journal:

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RIM has identified a nearly 40-acre site near Alpharetta’s Norty Point Mall, said sources familiare with the company’s plans. The company did not make executivez availablefor comment. RIM’s plans call for hirin g technical talent, who will on average, about $70,000, and work on developing next-generationb BlackBerry devices, a source said. RIM, which is in expansioh mode, probably picked the Atlanta area because it is home to a majo rcustomer — AT&T Mobility, said Tavis McCourt, an analyst with Keegan & Co. Inc. who follows RIM. “The close you are to your customer, the better,” McCourt said.
RIM previouslyt clustered its operations in Canada but is nowdiversifyingg geographically.The company has facilities in Chicago; Redwood City, Calif.; South Florida and Seattle. In Dallas, RIM acquirecd an office complex composed of six office buildings andtotaling 460,300 square feet for its U.S. headquarters. RIM occupies about 133,139 square feet within the with the balancebeing sublet. RIM leased an additional 457,248 squarer feet throughout the U.S., accordingg to the company. RIM said that in the comingy year, it will grow and evolve its supplygchain model.
RIM will also look to enhance its new producy introduction and supply chain planning activities througb further integration with RIM internal research anddevelopmenty activities. “RIM is growing substantially. They are doing a lot more developmenf aroundthe world,” McCourt said. “Asx they become bigger players in each of these they want to havelocal management.” Revenu e for the fiscal year endes Feb. 28 was $11 billion, up 84 RIM’s consumer smartphone market share increased 15 percentt to nearly 50 percent of the smartphone market in the first quarter versus theprior quarter.
RIM is musclingt up its data center and development infrastructure as the handsett industry shifts toward amore services-oriented one. “Allk these devices are starting to lookthe same,” McCourt said. “But, the amount of softward that you add to them is growing RIM is investingabout $300 million a quarter in capita l spending, including infrastructure and softwarde development, and doubled its employe base last year, the analyst said. The compant is also adding more data center capacity to help avoid a repea of the massive network outage that took placew earlierthis year.
That outage, whicgh left millions of “CrackBerry” addictxs without service, was triggerefd by a faulty software upgrade at adata center. “If they had multiple data McCourt said, “perhaps they woule have been able to manage softwar upgrades alittle [more] smoothly with less risk.” RIM’ss Alpharetta data center is expected to be a Tier 3 or Tier 4 facilityg — the highest level of reliability and security. A Tier 4 data center is a stand-alone facility with at leas t two power feeds from separate saidJulie Moore, businesa specialist with Dolphini Networks, a Tenn.-based data center.
Data centers, which can be as largde as shopping malls, are warehouses stackedc floor-to-ceiling with computer servers, storage systems and other hardware that power Web crunch data andstore information. The RIM building, currentlyg under construction, is estimated to be aboutt 200,000 square feet, a source The building will likely have anestimated 50,000 squarwe feet to 60,000 square feet of “raised space” the area that housesz the servers and computer equipment that is the heart of the data