BlackBerry's lucrative message

When Research In Motion's (NASDAQ: RIMM) platform suffered an outage recently, some of my friends went into panic. How can you possibly do business without your BlackBerry?

So, it should be no surprise that RIM's business is going gangbusters. In fact, today the company reported that it expects subscriber numbers to increase 15% to 20% above its prior forecast of 1.82 million (for fiscal Q3). Basically, the company benefited from a particularly strong Christmas season.

The upshot: RIM's stock is up 9% to $106.61.

Well, I had a chance to talk to Steve Beauregard, who is a BlackBerry expert and operates REGARD Venture Solutions. According to him:

"RIM continues to surprise everyone except those of us that have been on the platform for years. I have seen so many 'BlackBerry Killers' come and go that the patterns are becoming more predictable. The Curve is quite simply the best device on the market for enterprise to consumer cross-over. In speaking with close industry sales people, the large majority of their customer conversations are still about BlackBerry."

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.