"Certicom has integration with a whole bunch of different handset vendors. I think this will ultimately strengthen the BlackBerry portfolio," he said.

A tie-up with Certicom will also put RIM in a better position to meeting more vigorous security requirements especially in the government sector, says Ryan Reith, analyst with IDC. For example, he said, U.S. government agencies require technology vendors to address five different levels of encryption and so far RIM has accomplished three of them.

For BlackBerry users, data is usually encrypted before it leaves the network operations centre, then is re-encrypted when it flows through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and encrypted a third time when the data reaches the receiving BlackBerry device, Reith said.