Has the BlackBerry golden goose been cooked for Etisalat?

On the heels of my blog colleagues post on Etisalat's PR disaster with its recent bungling of the BlackBerry "spyware" saga, I begun to wonder how this will affect the telecom operator's relationship with the smartphone's Canadian manufacturer, Research In Motion (RIM).

In my most recent reporting job for a Canadian national business paper, I covered RIM for about two years, writing everything from quarterly earnings reports to getting the scoop on some of its upcoming product releases. I also had the opportunity to meet and interview the company's co-chief executive Jim Balsillie quite a few times. So, I'm quite familiar with the company's operations.

Mr Balsillie is a busy man. Aside from running one of the hottest technology companies in the world, he is also attempting to purchase and relocate a National Hockey League team as well as trying to snap up a business unit of Nortel, a beleaguered Canadian telecom equipment firm,  away from Nokia Siemens and Ericsson [update: Ericsson won in the end]. In his spare time - if he has any - the executive likes to play ice hockey in a highly competitive league, giving bodychecks as much as he takes them. In the course of a decade, his aggresive grit and competitive streak has made him one of Canada's most respected businessmen, and it's safe to say that he will be the subject of many MBA courses for years to come.

On top of all that, he just had to deal with the global public relations fallout of one of its carrier partners sending an unauthorized software patch that appears to circumvent security protocols. Security, by the way, is paramount to the BlackBerry, a feature which like to heavily leverage to their customers, constantly bragging about their uncrackable 256-bit encryption technology that not even the US government has been able to hack.

Needless to say, this is the last thing Mr. Balsillie and RIM would like to deal with. While it remains to be seen how Etisalat's moves will influence the company's relations with RIM, the BlackBerry maker has been nothing short of a golden goose for the mobile firm. Each month, Etisalat's 145,000 BlackBerry users pay a hefty monthly fee to access their mobile services, while each new BlackBerry product flies off shelves as soon as people realise they can upgrade their year-old devices.

It will certainly be interesting to see how RIM negotiates future product releases with Etisalat and whether we will begin to see du offer more robust BlackBerry packages in the near future. Will RIM forgive Etisalat's software patch so easily? Knowing Mr. Balsillie's business acumen, it certainly will not be forgotten anytime soon.