CNBC recently posted a letter from BlackBerry’s interim CEO John Chen, who said that the company’s troublesome past in no way reflects what BlackBerry has the potential to be. Further, he said BlackBerry is still the leader of the mobile enterprise.
“When it comes to enterprise, we’re still the leader,” said Chen. “Don’t be fooled by the competition’s rhetoric claiming to be more secure or having more experience than BlackBerry. With a global enterprise customer base exceeding 80,000, we have three times the number of customers compared to Good, AirWatch and MobileIron combined. This makes BlackBerry the leader in mobile-device management.
“Many in the regulated industries — those with the most stringent security needs — still depend solely on BlackBerry to secure their mobile infrastructure. For governments, BlackBerry cannot just be replaced — we are the only MDM provider to obtain “Authority to Operate” on U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) networks. This means the DoD is only allowed to use BlackBerry. Across the globe, seven out of seven of the G7 governments are also BlackBerry customers.”
While Google and Apple have clearly surpassed BlackBerry in the consumer mobile market, BlackBerry was famously known for its place in the enterprise and government markets. However, many government agencies dropped BlackBerry throughout 2012.
For instance, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) ditched their BlackBerrys in May 2012 in favor of iPhones. Immigration and Customs Enforcement followed suit in September, and in October, the Defense Department left its BlackBerrys behind and chose to go with Android and Apple devices instead. Later in November of that year, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that it was dropping its BlackBerry smartphones for a new fleet of iPhone 5s.
In October 2011, for four days, BlackBerry users from around the world completely lost their messaging, browsing and email services. These three features are key to any business (or consumer) user, and proved to be a huge mark on RIM’s record. RIM blamed the service troubles on an extremely critical network failure during a system upgrade.
In March of this year, BlackBerry 10 (BB10) — the company’s latest mobile operating system — failed to pass security requirements for the UK government.
But Chen prefers to look ahead at BlackBerry’s future potential, and learn from past mistakes rather than let them define the company.
According to Chen’s letter in CNBC, making “swift and impactful changes” such as new top executives has been crucial to BlackBerry’s turnaround efforts. New leaders were essential in enterprise, marketing, corporate development and strategic planning.
Chen further said that BlackBerry will focus on services and software, and move to a new operating structure including Enterprise Services, Messaging, QNX Embedded business and the Devices business. He added that in the last 60 days, over 40 million new iOS and Android users have registered to use BBM.
