How many rim employees in waterloo

The company's bankers are exploring "strategic business model alternatives" -- corporate-speak for "uh oh" -- and its much-hyped potential savior, the next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system, was just delayed again until He'll have a chance to expand on that vision at Tuesday's annual meeting.

Local TV news and radio stations were buzzing Monday night about the highly anticipated gathering. But the common wisdom is that at some point pretty soon, the Canadian tech icon will cease to exist in its current form. That leaves Waterloo, population ,, with a big question: What next? RIM's influence is everywhere in Waterloo and Kitchener, an adjacent city of , residents whose downtown is dotted with small boutiques and new construction.

It's in RIM Park, the acre activity center that's home to ballfields and an hole golf course. Perhaps most importantly, RIM's influence has shaped the local populace. It has long been the company that attracted techie types to the town, and many of those in the Waterloo tech scene are RIM alumni. That's apparent in the epicenter of Kitchener-Waterloo's tech home base: The Communitech Hub , a 44,square-foot startup incubator housed in a reclaimed tannery building.

Communitech offers services to about companies, and nearly are located in the urban-industrial-chic Tannery HQ. Following RIM's series of mass layoffs , part of Communitech's role has been "absorbing" those workers and keeping the talent in Waterloo, Klugman says. Like many local residents, Klugman strikes an optimistic tone when talking about the future of RIM.

But they are just so dear to our region on so many levels. Lind said people talk about RIM and its future in "hushed tones," afraid to be seen speaking ill of such an important player in the community. Last week, he gave a presentation on the outlook for commercial real estate in the city and joked that RIM was "the elephant in the room.

Lind said. But many others around town simply don't accept that RIM's future is in question. When asked if she had any doubts about RIM's future, Ms. Halloran tersely replied: "No.

That isn't even something we worry about. That feeling is shared by many. For us we're very excited about this next chapter for RIM. When pressed, Mr. Klugman conceded the departure of Mr. Lazaridis as RIM's top executives both will remain directors has affected the city. They've always been there. And it's kind of like, 'Oh, wow. Waterloo has been through something like this before.

The city was founded in by Germans, Mennonites and British, who arrived with a multitude of skills and a spirit of entrepreneurship. Joseph Seagram was among them. He founded a distilling company in Waterloo in that eventually became one of the largest liquor businesses in the world. And UW does not silo that talent the way some schools might, through restrictive intellectual property agreements. The university values entrepreneurship. He dropped out to start Research in Motion.

He says that Waterloo and the surrounding area has the right combination of ingredients to enable tech entrepreneurs: strong academic brands, including UW and several other schools; a culture that accepts deviance risking your future by going into business for yourself rather than someone else , and a network of capital comfortable with risk. He says on average one local startup is founded every day.

Phil Noelting relocated job-application management company, Qwalify, in He spent two years working for RIM starting in the fall of , just as the company began to reap rewards of an extensive marketing push into the United States. At the time, the local IT community was small, as he remembers it; instead, the big industry was insurance.

OpenText was around, as were a few local players, but it was RIM's growth that helped the local industry become what it is today.

Indeed, the company bought up nearly all the buildings on Philip Street, near the UW campus, where university spin-offs used to dwell. But the startups have multiplied and found another street. All part of the cycle, Eckert would say. But if Jason Eckert sees RIM as an evolutionary loser in the Darwinian jungle of consumer technology, Elliott, the former employee, seems to have a more personal investment in its survival.

A lot of the community, not only in their own self-interest, want RIM to continue to do well Now, at least to the casual observer, there seem to be more signs for the Perimeter Institute than for RIM itself.