RIM (Research In Motion) sent out a press release and posted a blog post announcing that they have decided the days of the Wireless Enterprise Symposium - referred to as WES - have come to an end after 9 years. Instead, RIM will be putting on a different event dubbed BlackBerry World (or BlackBerry World Conference) which will have everything WES had and more.

BlackBerry World 2011 is going to be in the same place and on the same dates that WES 2011 was planned for - May 3-5 in Orlando, FL at the Orlando World Center Marriot and the Hilton Bonnet Creek (which, according to GoogleMaps, are a 10 minute drive from each other). BlackBerry World registration opens January 2011. If you’d like to receive email updates about BlackBerry World 2011 click here to sign up.

So what will BlackBerry World have? It will have all the usual WES tracks and sessions that people have gotten used to over the past 9 years along with several new, exclusive, and invite-only BlackBerry Channel Partners tracks. Also BlackBerry World will feature “keynote speeches from [Ed: as of yet unnamed] leading mobile thinkers, over 100 breakout sessions, Hands-on Labs, BlackBerry training, and opportunities for certification.” They’ll have more than 100 sessions on a wide range of subjects including supporting individual-liable smartphones in your environment to getting up to speed on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. There will be a Solutions Showcase in which over 150 Sponsors will be taking part, where attendees are promised they will find apps that make their job easier and apps that make waiting in line easier. Obviously the event will also include the very latest in BlackBerry announcements.

For the full, subject to change and not fully fleshed out, BlackBerry World Agenda go here.

Interestingly, RIM has yet to set up a redirect for the WES website to the BlackBerry World website. If you go to the old WES website there is even a link to sign up for WES 2011 email updates. In fact, for a time today, if you clicked to “Sign Up For Updates” on the BlackBerry World site you were immediately taken to a page (screen capture of it below) which still had the WES branding (and is the same form the link on the WES site takes you to if you’re interested in WES 2011 updates). This has since been fixed since I started writing this post but I kept the screen capture (taken a little after 4pm EST Dec. 9, 2010) with the old branding anyway.

For more check out the links below

Inside BlackBerry: Official BlackBerry Blog Post About BlackBerry World Launch [LINK]

BlackBerry World Website [LINK]

BlackBerry World Email Updates Sign Up [LINK]

BlackBerry World Agenda (subject to change) [LINK]