BlackBerry eyes Android, Apple enterprise users

Company is working on including Windows Messenger on its enterprise servers

After wooing Android and Apple users to use its BlackBerry Messenger application, Canada-based tech company BlackBerry is turning its attention to the enterprise segment.

The company claims to sell more of its enterprise servers and services, which enable the management of an increasing working population that uses a mix of a variety of devices. Called bring your own device (BYOD), the company’s servers, the current one being BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10, supports devices running Android or Apple’s iOS, in the  enterprise space.

It is also working on including Windows Messenger on its enterprise servers. Sunil Lalvani, managing director of BlackBerry India said they had already set up 1,000 enterprise servers in India.

“We can offer one server for all devices. No other vendor has this kind of back-end to support enterprise activity,” he said.

In the previous quarter, the company installed 13,000 such servers and 1,000 of them were in India. This is expected to grow as more enterprise applications shift to mobiles and tablets.

“The BlackBerry server still remains a gold standard for security and a number of enterprises prefer us,” said Lalvani.

The company is using its unique selling proposition to shore up its presence in the country. With more employees preferring to bring in their own personal devices across tables and mobile handsets, companies are becoming more prudent in installing more security into these devices.

The 10-year old BlackBerry server, known for its security features, is one of the pioneers of the work-on-mobile culture.

The culture extended from being a premium service to becoming a popular application. This change, however, also came with more of its premium users preferring other devices with touch screen capabilities. BlackBerry became a late entrant into the segment as Apple and Samsung inched ahead in selling touchscreen handsets to Indian smartphone users, who have multiplied in numbers in two years.

However, BlackBerry is not mourning its losses in the device business. In its previous quarterly earnings, its revenue from services and software, contributed to 60 per cent of total sales.

“Devices will however remain our focus as we are launching new handsets. We are looking at four major revenue streams now,” explained Lalvani. The enterprise segment is the second-most focused division of the company. The third is its pioneering effort in instant messaging—BlackBerry Messenger. It has an enterprise version of it, called eBBM wherein a company can form a work group with its employees and engage in group chat.

The audits of this conversation can be secured and retrieved and BlackBerry’s security does not allow these conversations to be shared or copied. The fourth revenue stream of BlackBerry comes from the company acquired by it three years earlier, QNX Embedded Systems.

“It does mission-critical work for organisations like Nasa, US radio, healthcare and the automobile industry,” said Lalvani.

The company hopes most of its services from this vertical would be used by India’s automobile industry. The applications include global positioning systems among others which constitutes into making smart cars.