WES 2009 officially kicked off yesterday with a general session. Despite a tough economy and swine flu fears, the room was PACKED (close to 5,000 attendees at WES, barely down from last year if I recall correct - seems busy as heck here). 

As we predicted previously, with the roll out of BES 5.0 and recent launch of App World, this year's WES is very focused on enterprise with some good developer stuff all added into the mix. So while it may not be quite as exciting to some of you from an end-user consumer perspective (no all-new device announcement like the past two years), it's still awesome to see all of the work being done with the BlackBerry solution and to see examples and hear testimonials of just how powerful a solution it really is. We still have a ton of WES 2009 coverage to come, but in the meantime you can listen in to RIM's President and Co-CEO, Mike Lazaridis, give his welcome to WES 2009 speech by downloading the .mp3 below (21 minutes, 7MB).

• Listen to Mike Lazaridis' WES 2009 Keynote >>