Even as BlackBerry has been making its last, all-out attempt to tower over the mobile device sector again, it has also been bowing to years of pressure to open up its real crown jewels, such as its messaging software and back end device management offerings, to newer platforms. BlackBerry Enterprise Server was reworked for other mobile operating systems, and there have been recurring reports of the new BB10 OS itself being licensed to third parties. The latest development is that BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), the driver of the Canadian firm’s growth in some emerging markets, may be preloaded on rival smartphones.
BlackBerry COO Kristian Tear told CNET that the firm was already in talks with a number of potential handset partners, seeking to extend its applications reach and its brand, and hedge its bets against the failure of its new smartphones ‘ the Z10, Q10 and, reportedly coming in November, the A10.
“There is interest from other handset makers,” Tear said in the interview. The company has already said it would make BBM available on iOS and Android from this summer, but of course, preloading would spur uptake. OEMs’ willingness to give it this boost might signify that they were no longer worried about BlackBerry as a competitor, but could also be driven by carriers. Operators would welcome a strong counterweight to over-the-top messaging services, and tend to regard BlackBerry as friendly to their networks.
Tear denied there was a major flight from BBM as more users adopted Android and iOS, and said the service has an active user base of 61m customers around the world, with 70% using it daily. The large base of active users would make it very attractive to partners, he added, and the company also hopes that BBM could lead new users to consider BlackBerry hardware, with its optimized messaging experience, in future.
He dismissed the risk of the move accelerating the flight from BB10, if users could run their favorite application on a different handset. “We don’t feel like that is a risk,” he said. “Obviously, if we did, we might have acted differently.”
BlackBerry has also launched a cloud version of its BES 10.1 offering and says it already has several triallists. BlackBerry Enterprise Server will be available ‘as a service’ now it has been extended to support Android and iOS as well as BBM devices, in a BYOD (bring your own device) environment. Pete Devenyi, BlackBerry’s SVP of enterprise software, told ZDnet that BES 10.1 also delivers virtualization improvements for those who still want to run BES on their own servers and virtual machines. That includes the ability to run BES 10.1 and BES 5 (to support older implementations and legacy BlackBerry devices) on the same server and makes it simpler for smaller organizations to quickly deploy BES 10.1 in a VM.