RIM CEO to New COO, CMO: Welcome to My Nightmare

Research In Motion has filled two vacant slots on its executive team, hiring a chief operating officer and a chief marketing officer. Kristian Tear, formerly an executive VP at Sony Mobile Communications, will serve as the company’s new COO. RIM also tapped Frank Boulben, who previously served as EVP of strategy, marketing and sales for LightSquared, as CMO.

Both are important hires for RIM, which has been without a CMO since 2011, and without a COO since Thorsten Heins became the company’s new CEO in January. They join the company at a difficult juncture, as it scrambles to launch its new BlackBerry 10 OS this fall, and again go head to head with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, operating systems that have bled RIM of market share with hardware that resonates with consumers and far more well-established application ecosystems.