Research In Motion will spend roughly $100 million to purchase NewBay to boost its cloud services, according to a report in The Irish Times.

The $100 deal is a relatively large sum for RIM, so what will it be getting? On its website, NewBay says it offers, “a white label software platform, called LifeCache, that powers cloud-based services for storing, sharing, accessing and organizing digital content.”

Despite its faults, it’s clear that RIM has a decent vision and setup for certain aspects of the smartphone war. We’re going to see a lot more of QNX next month and I believe it will be an above-average platform for smartphones. RIM’s messaging and security infrastructure is also second-to-none.

But in the consumer cloud deparment, RIM is lacking – I didn’t even really feel it was necessary to include it in my cloud comparison of iOS, Android and Windows Phone. The NewBay acquisition could and should change that but it may take a while for this to be implemented. For some context, RIM bought Torch Mobile to boost its browser in 2009 but consumers didn’t see the impact until Fall 2010 with the release of the original BlackBerry Torch.

[Via The Irish Times, photo: Shutterstock – Pakhnyushcha]