You might have thought that BlackBerry-maker RIM had a year to forget in 2011, what with the outage its joint CEO’s stepping down, and its market share being eroded in several markets. But according to Rory O’ Neill, VP, regional marketing EMEA at RIM, it was anything but.

In an interview with Mobile Marketing, O’Neill claims that in fact, 20111 was “an unbelievably good year”, and backs up the surprising claim with a number of stats, including 20m new customers and a 57 per cent year-on-year increase in revenues.
O’Neill also concedes that the company handled the outage that hit its customers in October, saying: “We recognised that as a company, we were not grown up enough to have as mature a response in terms of communications as we should have done, but that sort of thing only needs to happen once in a company. The problem will never happen again, but if it does, the response will be different. We know we need to explain and communicate what is happening and when it’s happening. We need to apologise and demonstrate when we are taking action and communicate what we are doing about it.”

You can read the full interview here.