The News: The head of BlackBerry has outlined more detail of how the company is continuing its transition into a true software giant.
Speaking at the recent BlackBerry World Tour event in London, CEO John Chen outlined the rapid pace the company has enjoyed over the past 12 months in accelerating its push into the IoT and security spaces.
Since leaving its mobile hardware operations back in 2015, BlackBerry has focused largely on software, with its Spark security platform hoping to help simplify protecting the IoT. Read the full coverage of Blackberry CEO John Chen’s presentation on Tech Radar.
Analyst Take: While the idea that BlackBerry will once again dominate any category seems unfathomable, the company has made a strong return from the brink of death to become a legitimate player in the security space.
The company’s Spark security platform continues to evolve and with the acquisition of AI endpoint security company Cylance, earlier this year, the company expanded its grip on end point security to cover secure communications, zero-trust platforms, and the ever important need for authentication/identity management.
Essentially, Blackberry is now a true provider of end-to-end security for endpoint solutions. And the proliferation of mobile devices is certainly leading the charge in terms of viability, but perhaps nothing needs a complete turnkey solution more than IoT.
What is BlackBerry doing in IoT
According to Chen, the company’s already managing around half a billion endpoints (conservatively) and this is believed to include around 150 million QNX endpoints (Vehicles) that BlackBerry is delivering endpoint security to.
The demarcation of endpoint and IoT was somewhat vague, but as edge, deep edge and IoT all have some issues with consistent interpretation, I’ll put give some slack in the way these numbers are represented.
When it comes to IoT, the problem is often that the devices themselves are fairly simplistic (albeit that also has levels of variability). The edge compute devices, which are more and more beginning to look like mini-clouds are going to be critical to secure as these devices are going to be responsible for securing billions of IoT devices and this is where the real opportunity lies for BlackBerry.
Is BlackBerry The Company to Protect The Edge and IoT?
As we see predictions for IoT device growth to an estimated 41.6 Billion devices creating over 75 Zetabytes of data, the need to harden the edge and create sophisticated AI powered security and intrusion detection will only become more critical.
However, do not for a moment think that this category isn’t being looked at closely by a plethora of highly capable cybersecurity players as well as upstarts that see this opportunity.
What can be said is that BlackBerry has certainly seemed to find its mojo and its fun to see the company reborn with a new identity and a desire to solve a real problem that needs significant attention.
Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.
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Image: BlackBerry
The original version of this article was first published on Futurum Research.
Daniel Newman is the Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and the CEO of Broadsuite Media Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise. From Big Data to IoT to Cloud Computing, Newman makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology projects, which leads to his ideas regularly being cited in CIO.Com, CIO Review and hundreds of other sites across the world. A 5x Best Selling Author including his most recent “Building Dragons: Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy,” Daniel is also a Forbes, Entrepreneur and Huffington Post Contributor. MBA and Graduate Adjunct Professor, Daniel Newman is a Chicago Native and his speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.