Marxist Hacker has the right idea.

When I pitched needing a lab, I was pretty quickly shot down since it was costs they couldn't see the benefit from.

Wait a month and pitch it again except this time from the aspect of downtime, redundant hardware diminishes this. Was an easy sell. And now, I have a second set of hardware I can test on.

Win.

other email systems, you mean like Lotus Domino or Novell Groupwise? BES already runs on those collaboration platforms. Aside from it working with nearly any POP/SMTP server, do you mean running the BlackBerry software on other devices?