News

Blackberry Refocus on Enterprise Space

BlackBerry has announced new partnerships, enterprise solutions and value-added services that they say will improve productivity, communication and collaboration for enterprises.

The announcements made during BlackBerry’s Enterprise Portfolio Launch event in San Francisco include new partnerships, tools and technologies that further expand BlackBerry’s enterprise portfolio spanning Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), Identity & Access, and Communications & Collaboration. BES12: a cross-platform EMM solution by BlackBerry serves as the company’s foundation to control access, data and applications across all mission-critical endpoints and devices, supporting all major enterprise platforms.

“Our Enterprise Portfolio, with BES12 at its foundation, does so much more than just manage cross-platform devices. Amongst many other capabilities, the portfolio provides easy and safe access to corporate data, manages an array of employee IDs, and offers new ways to securely and conveniently collaborate with colleagues,” said John Sims, President of Global Enterprise Services at BlackBerry.

“Today’s announcements demonstrate that BlackBerry is delivering on our promise to design and develop enterprise solutions that drive secure communications and collaboration for our customers. Everything we and our broad-based ecosystem of partners, including systems integrators, mobile operators and distributors, do is to deliver greater productivity and efficiency to our customers.”

The new enterprise solutions and services announced by BlackBerry today include:

•BES12, the foundation of BlackBerry’s portfolio, manages apps and content across devices from every major mobile platform, including iOS, Android™, Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices. Vodafone, Rogers, SingTel and many more mobile operators around the world will resell BES12.

•BlackBerry announced a strategic partnership with Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. to provide a highly secure mobility solution for Android. As a result, early next year enterprise customers will have a new choice: a tightly integrated, end-to-end secure solution that brings together BES12 with Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablets that include Samsung KNOX.

•BlackBerry Blend for the Enterprise is part of BlackBerry’s EMM offerings and makes it possible for employees to maximize their productivity by securely accessing personal and work data from their BlackBerry smartphone on any desktop or tablet. With a foundation built on BlackBerry security, BlackBerry Blend revolutionizes IT administration by shifting from managing devices to managing information movement and reduces the need for VPN, lowering total cost of ownership.

•WorkLife by BlackBerry will allow enterprises to easily add a separate corporate phone number to personal devices brought in by their employees or for the employee to add a separate personal phone number to a corporate-liable device provided by the company. This will enable voice, SMS and data usage to be charged to the company while all other usage is charged directly to the employee, with no need to file and process expense reports or pay stipends. The solution will operate while on the home network as well as in roaming situations.