Last week Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) experienced an outage of its mobile-messaging service in North America, disrupting customers and underscoring the importance of unwired connectivity for the virtual workforce.

Ninety-three percent of enterprises interviewed for the Nemertes’ benchmark, "Building the Successful Virtual Workplace," said they were using smartphones such as the Blackberry for mobile worker applications, primarily e-mail, with a 12-month growth rate of 100%.

RIM's outage demonstrates the problems of a centralized architecture for mobile-message delivery. Enterprises are completely reliant on RIM's service to distribute mobile messages to their Blackberry users and, as such, are at the mercy of RIM to ensure reliable application performance.

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