On Monday, Blackberry officially announced that the company is procuring mobile device management vendor 'Good Technology' for $425 million according to a report on Bharat Today. This serves as BlackBerry's beacon of shifting its focus by expanding its mobile enterprise security platform after it has lost most of its worldwide handset market-share. This shift perfectly makes some sense considering that the company's goal is all about delivering secure mobile solutions. BlackBerry, the once leading company in enterprise mobility had lost its dominant position after Android and Apple came along.
As cited on Tech Crunch, BlackBerry led US mobile marketshare with more than 42% in September 2009. Nevertheless, the company plunged to 1.5% in a very recent July report, which is a clear indication that BlackBerry isn't going to be a key player in the handset market. BlackBerry CEO, Marty Beard, said that 'it was really just a logical extension of BlackBerry's existing strategy to expand into enterprise mobility across platforms.' In a company blog post, Beard wrote: "But when you look more closely, you see that we share a common heritage in security and our strengths complement each other incredibly well."
In a press conference, CEO John Chen said that 'the two companies fit well together, especially given that Good's strength is in iOS, where BlackBerry is not as strong' according to a news article on Tech Crunch. On the same article, Chen likewise emphasized that 'Blackberry decides to switch to a subscription business, and the vast majority of Good's revenue comes from subscriptions'. This gives the company an existing platform to make this transition.
Chen pointed out that the purchase of the Mobile Device Management was in fact part of a larger acquisitions strategy as the company attempts to pivot to an enterprise mobile security platform. Just last year, the company purchased the German voice encryption firm Secusmart. In April, Blackberry snagged an enterprise file security company, WatchDox.
The founder at Constellation Research, R Ray Wang, said that "while that debt ultimately hurt the company, it has some of the best enterprise mobility management products on the market," as reported on Tech Crunch. Wang also said that "the result is a powerhouse EMM offering with 70+ security certificates, but the real gold here is the ability to get to a platform to support Internet of Things."
This is indeed a smart move for the company, facilitating cross-platform into iOS and Android.
