In an attempt to fight market share loss, BlackBerry is vying to
be the secure enterprise platform across all mobile operating
systems.
At an event today in San Francisco, the Canadian phone
maker rolled out more details on its BlackBerry Enterprise
Service 12 (BES12), its latest platform for how mobile devices
connect securely that will work on rival mobile devices Apple
AAPL +1.39% iOS and Google GOOGL -0.33% Android.
With this announcement, BlackBerry revealed partnerships
with Salesforce and Samsung.
“BES servers have more enterprise customers than the next
three competitors combined,” said John Sims, BlackBerry’s
president of global enterprise services, at the event.
“Customers use and trust BES. They trust BlackBerry as a
supplier. We want to increase the number of choices.”
BlackBerry integrates BES12 into Samsung’s Knox software for
devices such as the Galaxy S4 and Note 4 tablet to make them
more secure. Knox is Samsung’s own mobile security solution,
but a security vulnerability was revealed recently. This
software integration will be available early next year on
Samsung devices. With better security, this could help Samsung
better reach the enterprise market. Samsung has been working
hard to get into this segment with other partnerships,
including one with German enterprise software giant SAP .
Apple is also hoping to grab a greater share of enterprise
customers with its IBM partnership announced in July.
The partnership with Salesforce is focusing on more regulated
industries, such as healthcare and the public sector, where
sensitive documents need to be managed securely. The
partnership will let users access this sensitive data on
Salesforce software securely on BlackBerry’s platform.
“There’s this massive investment in the public sector and
healthcare that recognizes customers are on mobile
platforms,” said Vivek Kundra, the executive vice president of
global public sector at Salesforce, at the event. “When it comes
to managing large enterprises, you have to be platform
agnostic.”
BlackBerry’s global market share has declined to a small
fraction of the overall smartphone market in recent years–2.4
percent, according to Strategy Analytics for smartphone unit
sale data in the second quarter of this year. Similarly, revenue
is continuing to fall. Its second quarter saw revenue decline to
$916 million from $1.57 billion over last year.
But BlackBerry CEO John Chen was feeling good about the
future direction of the company and had a message for
competitors.
“I recall a year ago when I first started I was watching CNBC
and one of our competitors was making fun of us,” said Chen.
“My advice to competitors is that we are not only a point
product company, we are an EMM [Enterprise Mobility
Management] solution, very broad and very deep. They need
to understand that. They need to work for a living rather than
make fun of us.”
BlackBerry is also planning how its security management
platform could be applied in areas outside of smartphones
and into the whole nebulous “Internet of Things” space,
though it’s not ready to talk about concrete plans around that
today.
Although the actual making of phones is being less emphasized
in Chen’s vision for the new BlackBerry, the company came
out with the Passport, a chunky smartphone with a square-
shaped display, in September.
BlackBerry shares are up nearly 9 percent.
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