In the wake of Research in Motion's recent outage that left millions of users without access to their data and email, Vodafone UK has announced that it will use a third-party solution to guarantee Blackberry service.

The wireless provider has inked a deal with Neverfail, a software company that provides continuous availability solutions, to provide uninterrupted coverage for Blackberry service.

By adding Neverfail's solution into our Managed Service portfolio, we can offer enormous service expertise to protect critical parts of our customers' IT infrastructure, said Curt Hopkins, Head of Enterprise Mobility Solutions, Vodafone UK.

The Vodafone Neverfail High Availability Service for BlackBerry, as it is called, automatically detects BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) outages, and kicks in a secondary server in less than 90 seconds the firm said.

A problem with a routine upgrade caused a massive BlackBerry outage for three hours last week, affecting all users in North America.

RIM has been adding corporate, government and retail subscribers at a rapid pace and has had to expand its capacity in step to handle increased e-mail and other data traffic. Its total subscriber base sits at about 12 million

Software Blackberry