Blackberry clients for Connections and Quickr withdrawn by IBM, no replacements available

Announced today:

Effective on the dates listed below, IBM will withdraw from marketing, part numbers from the following product release(s) licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement:

Program   marketing
number    date       Program release name
 
5724-Y93  07/13/11   Blackberry Client for IBM Lotus Software

On or after that date, you can no longer obtain the withdrawn product(s) directly from IBM.

Replacement products
There are no replacements available.

Given these clients have not been updated by RIM since long before Connections 3.0.x and Quickr 8.5 were released, this isn’t altogether a surprise, particularly as the infrastructure needed to run the clients (a separate Windows-only BES-style server called the SNAP) was pretty onerous to configure.

Not sure if RIM themselves will continue to sell the clients, or if this is the end of the line.  IBM seem much more willing to develop native clients themselves these days, particularly for iOS and Android so perhaps this will be the future for Blackberry too?