Blackberry is suffering in part because its technology has been, to date, very reliable. That has led to a dependency that the service will always be there. It’s something we we are familiar with at OpenBrolly. Tens of thousands of users rely on our information systems daily to allow them to effectively do their jobs or manage their leisure.

To deliver on this promise we work with Amazon cloud technologies and other traditional architectures to give us flexibility and redundancy. If a server goes down we can fire up a new one in minutes. Data is held on multiple sites. If a client needs additional capacity for a product launch we can bring it online quickly.

We manage and deliver many terabytes of data which comes with its own challenges. Our clients trust us to overcome these so they can get on with running their businesses without worrying about servers and technical systems. We repay this trust with very high levels of availability, fast access to data and managed backup solutions.

Reports suggest that Blackberry suffered a “perfect storm” – failures of backup equipment after primary equipment failed. The huge volumes of data they deal with meant that there was an immediate domino effect as other systems overflowed with information and failed. This yesterday spread from Europe to the US as the North American systems failed with huge amounts of undelivered messages to Europe.

The industry as a whole needs to urgently find new ways of dealing with failures involving these volumes of data. Amazon, who also have be known for reliability, suffered as a series of hardware failures combined to cause a whole data centre to become unavailable as resources in the remaining equipment were overwhelmed.

Perhaps increased decentralisation is the answer – it seems incredible that an entire continent’s communication systems should rely on hardware running in a single data centre. Many industry argue that either cloud or traditional computing is better. They both have many merits and many weaknesses and therefore more complex combinations of technologies may get the best of both worlds.

In this situation, though, Blackberry seems have have had a difficult relationship with its customers. A workshop I presented at yesterday had a few frustrated Blackberry users in the audience, many of whom said they would look at alternatives this weekend.

I can’t help but feel that Apple’s customers would have been angered and frustrated by such a failure. But there would have been little call from Apple’s customers to look to competing products as a solution. Blackberry’s customer experience, however, has been flagging for years in the light of developments from Android and Apple and disappointing hardware and software from RIM. Blackberry made matters worse with poor communication with customers – giving resolution times which were not delivered on meaning customers didn’t plan other ways to get to their information. They gave scant information about the problem at its outset which affected trust long term.

Sadly this customer service failure has turned a catastrophic technical failure into a catastrophic business failure. While the technical team licks their wounds and regroups, the management must ask themselves why their customer relationships have broken down to such an extent that this has become the excuse many of their customers have been looking for.

Thoughts? Comments to @davidrsim on Twitter.

The device, launched this week by Apple and due for European release in March, offers similar facilities to an iPhone but in a larger form factor. This makes more visual applications, such as those involving images and larger quantities of text, more accessible for a wide range of uses.

Our mobile application framework is being tested on the iPad with a view to taking advantage of the technology from the earliest opportunity. This is in addition to compatibility with the iPhone 3G, 3GS and the iPod Touch.

For more about the iPad, see http://www.apple.com/ipad/.

Open Brolly specialises in the development of data-driven mobile applications, displaying or collecting information.