BlackBerry appoints new COO to focus more on 'corporate users'

BlackBerry announced Monday it has appointed Marty Beard as chief operating officer to focus on keeping its enterprise customers and attracting new corporate users, effective immediately.

Beard will oversee marketing, application development, customer care, and quality, all of which BlackBerry describes as cross-functional organizations.

The company has been under pressure after a series of failure over last several years. At one point, BlackBerry CEO John Chen put his company's chances of surviving at 50 percent, saying that the sheer number of issues at the company were enough to bring down smaller firms. Earlier this year, however, Chen said BlackBerry's chances of survival are up to 80 percent, CNET reported.

While Blackberry had been trying to appeal to both consumers and corporate customers, Chen now sees chasing consumers as a mistake. He has repositioned BlackBerry to focus on keeping its enterprise customers and attracting new corporate users, report said.

Before joining BlackBerry, Beard was CEO at customer service cloud app provider LiveOps. He has also been president of Sybase's mobile messaging and commerce unit and has worked at Oracle.

Blackberry's previous COO, Kristian Tear, left in November, report added.