The Return of the Crackberry

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.

Whats the Next Dominant User Device?

Figures produced by Statista show global sales of Smart Phones since 2007 following the pattern of a classical S curve and plateauing last year (2017) at around 1.5 Billion units per year. 

If one considers that the average person will replace his or her device every 3 years or so (if they ignore their service provider trying to lock them into a replace every 2 years cycle), then it suggests that the market is saturated.

Indeed, Canalys's figures suggest that smart phone shipments in China dropped last year, especially at the upper end of the market. This reinforces the recent news that Apple is not shipping as many of its new iPhone X models as anticipated.

So where is the attention of consumers going and does this signify a new battleground for consumer devices and internet access?

Tablets are certainly not taking over. Last year's figures indicated a 20% global drop on sales by the top 5 vendors to around 200M units p.a. continuing a slip which appears to go back to 2014. In fact, Statista's figures for combined PC, Laptop and Tablet sales show significnat declines and are not forecast to increase either, suggesting combined sales of around 400 million p.a. which is still dwarfed by Smart Phones.

Figures for wearable technologies, smart watches, smart glasses, rings etc. are growing but are only at around 100 Million units p.a.

Smart speakers, such as Alexa and Google Assistant, do not appear to be the answer either. Although fast growing and central to the home automation market, Canalys puts 2018 global sales projections at only around 56M and to be honest smart digital assistants are already available on smart phone platforms.

Firesticks can be discounted too. They are really only focused on smart TVs and too niche to shoulder the whole burden.

Augmented reality glasses or mixed reality smart glasses are still kick starting after Googles original concept fired the imagination but failed in public. Google is back again with a refined, less clunky version, but so are a slew of other contenders: Microsoft with its Hololens (holographic, gesture driven windows 10), Vuzix with the Blade and Alexa integration, Lightwear and Meta 2 just to name a few. However global sales are yet to reach the 1 million units p.a. mark.

So where is the market going and who is going to capitalise on it? this is an interesting question as it implies the next dominant driver of digital technology exploitation as well as which companies will profit.

Although IoT will end up connecting billions more devices than consumer devices, the influence is likely to be lesser as there is less money to be made there. 1nce for example, is targeting a price point of 10 Euros per device for 10 years connectivity support. As the economics don't support higher prices. Sparce data is the name of the game, not high end functions and complex data sets.

Human Computer integration is coming, but not yet here. Again this is interesting as it appears to be catching up rapidly with wearables, so there may be some imminent convergence over the next 4 years or so.

So is fragmentation into niche applications slowing growth, or is this a pause before the next integrating concept comes along and what will it look like?

IoT Platforms

Companies going down the cloud bases PaaS route for hosting their applications have some interesting choices. There are 2 main leaders: Amazon, Microsoft and Google. There are also a lot of other platforms built around major applications, e.g. Salesforce & SAP, or technology stacks, e.g. IBM and Oracle.

Most of these platforms have quite features around provision of virtualised servers and storage as well as load balancing, with extensive options for scalability, as well as pricing models. All come with various database management system services as well as data analytic services for BI/Big Data usage.

Whilst Gartner makes a great show of assessing them against its own set of  Enterprise requirement criteria, this is unlikely to be meaningful for long as the leaders are engaged in an arms race to introduce an increasing number of features and capabilities which means that any 3rd party analyst's assessment is bound to be out of data almost as soon as it is published.

Enterprises have a fair guessing game about which platforms are going to be dominant in the future. This is almost impossible to get right. So more pragmatic approaches are needed. If an enterprise intends to move almost everything onto cloud platforms, then some analysis of what services its main SaaS applications uses may be appropriate. For companies tied into .Net, Microsoft Office and AD, then Azure may be a no brainer.

However, when it comes to IoT based applications, this may not be so simple. At present Amazon appears to have the leading  IoT support framework of the big 3 platform providers. Google and Microsoft appear to be trying to get in on the end device with specialist operating system offerings, so that they can own the whole stack. Likewise, Oracle is aiming to lever its Java specialism with its technology stack to provide specialist SaaS applications which facilitate rapid development in the IoT area.

My take is simple. For now anyway, most applications are going to have to deal with at least 2 PaaS platforms. One for internal applications and a second for externally facing applications and IoT. In reality, most corporations may need even more, especially if they want to exploit big application services such as SAP's and Salesforce's.