This week, Blackberry held its annual security conference in London. so it was a good time to catch up with what Blackberry is doing now, after the melt down of its original secure corporate phone and email business model.
Well, it is still in the phone business. Partnering with TCL, who undertakes hardware manufacture and smart phone distribution, blackberry is still designing new smart phones. The new models look very smart and offer a key pad equipped, touch sensitive android phone at a competitive price point, i.e. several hundred notes cheaper than the equivalent Samsung or Apple model. It would be easy to dismiss them as being a choice for someone who is into retro chic or an old school aficionado of key pads. However, there are some subtleties in the product design which are increasingly relevant in the current environment of aggressive cyber crime. The devices are designed and built bottom up to be resilient to infiltration and takeover, combining both hardware and software features for this. Additionally, the thumbprint security control is implemented in a way which allows the user to differentiate between what is private and what is shared. Which coupled with features in Android enabling separation between personal and corporate personas, makes it very much a smart phone of the age.
However, mobile phones are really only a side show and not the main story. Blackberry has built on its global secure telecommunications capabilities to emerge as a leading "Enterprise of Things" (EoT) enabler. Someone described its primary mission as being to "Secure your Communications and your Data". However the vision is one of comprehensively enabling secure IoT exploitation by enterprises, leveraging industry standard to deliver on government quality security in the deployment of Smart Things, or as one of the speakers stated "Moving from Mobile First to Things First".
There's a comprehensive set of products with SDKs which enable OEMs to develop secure smart products and Enterprises to deploy Thing based business models securely, whilst users enjoy a relatively seamless secure access experience across a comprehensive range of products.
Although what was probably the most impressive aspect of the conference was to see representatives from Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Blackberry discuss how they are collaborating to deliver a new generation of products which integrate securely and build the IoT world of the future.
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