Recently, BlackBerry announced that software takes the lead as the  company moves to transition from handset hardware development and leverage  third parties to  provide that function. With this development,  Nader Henein;  BlackBerry Regional Director, Advanced Security  Solutions  Advisory,  in this interview with Emeka Aginam  spoke on the  progress of the acquisitions made by the company, future of BlackBerry Devices  with software and security  still being at  forefront of the new strategy

Excerpt

Progress of BlackBerry acquisitions

We are not the kind of organisation that would acquire a company or product and then  disappear. We are very much big on integration and giving the user an end to end experience when it comes to what they get from BlackBerry and what services they get from BlackBerry. So in terms of Watchdox, Athoc, Good Technologies all these products, our commitment when we acquired these products was a continuous integration over the 12 to 18 months following acquisition and that is exactly what’s happened. The last release of BES 12 was one unified platform where you could manage all your devices be it on ASW or otherwise, you could manage any Athoc endpoint and you could also manage your Watchdox deployment from one unified location. The next release you will see a much closer integration of that with an increased capacity and scalability.

I can’t go into the details of our next release but I can promise you that the administrators and users are going to have a much smoother experience and a much more integrated experience. It’s not that the administrator can manage all these solutions from one location, the user can also share information between device solutions and leverage one and the other to be able to achieve a higher and closer level of collaboration as well as well as a faster response time for clients and customers.

The user experience that we are focusing on with our enterprise products and entire enterprise portfolio is that users can get the same level of usability they would get from a consumer solution that is a joy to use but with our products, they also get an embedded level of security that is military grade.

Nader Henein

Status of acquisitions

The Morvitu acquisition has been launched with a few network operators but we are still working on a few more. So, it is one of those things that unfortunately is slow paced into deployment so as an end user, once deployed you will not see it but get the functionality. Has it been  deployed widely? Not yet, not as much as we would like to see it deployed. Is it growing and are we seeing more and more support from the carrier partners and operators? Absolutely. Do we think that we are at the limit? Absolutely not.

So, it is very much going but not moving as fast as we would like to because the network operators would have to do quite a lot to be able to integrate Morvitu into their environment and it is something that we are trying to help them do day in day out so, it is just a question of the type of product and the work it takes to get it up and running.

Athoc deployment

With Athoc, it is deployed in Africa but i cannot  say where purely because the majority of our customers for Athoc right now are the military and government at least in the African continent. Having said that, it is up and running, it is functional and it is been used in incidences but I can’t tell you exactly who the customer is. What we are hoping for is a wider deployment and what we’re looking for to get us that wider deployment and a larger customer base is the right partners which is what we are actually trying to actively search for within Central and Western Africa.

Involvement of BlackBerry  in the design of the third party hardware.

From a user experience from the software perspective, we do the work end to end. From a hardware perspective, obviously we work very closely with the licensees to ensure that the experience is very fluid but also because it is our brand on these devices, we are heavily involved with them as well and to what level of involvement? Heavily involved because, it is the BlackBerrry brand at the end of the day.