For 12 years, Gregory Wade worked as a senior executive at BlackBerry, leading the company’s fast-growing Asia-Pacific business unit – a division that included vast emerging markets such as Indonesia.
In August last year, he quit BlackBerry and joined Samsung. A mere two months later Wade found himself in Samsung’s Silicon Valley offices in San Jose, Calif., sitting across the table from some of his long-time former colleagues helping Samsung hash out the final details of an unprecedented partnership with BlackBerry to deploy some of the Canadian company’s renowned security software on the company’s Galaxy smartphones.
“I joked, ‘Hey, you guys are finally going to have an opportunity to sell some really cool tablets,’†Mr. Wade said, referring to BlackBerry’s unpopular PlayBook tablet.
Mr. Wade, now the vice-president of Samsung’s enterprise business team, joined as part of the company’s push to succeed in the enterprise space that was once thoroughly dominated by BlackBerry.
IT departments, which had long trusted BlackBerry’s prowess with security and encryption, viewed Android’s more open, vulnerable software with disdain – and worried that it would lead to security breaches. Samsung knew that was a problem, Mr. Wade said.
“They recognized there were certain hurdles and challenges to overcome with respect to Android from a security perspective,†he said.
“And that’s where the company was able to tap into its talent to be able to build out that security platform.â€Â
And so far, the hirings of people such as Mr. Wade, the introduction of its Knox security platform, and its partnership with BlackBerry seem to be working.
Mr. Wade, who led BlackBerry’s push in many emerging markets and is now helping Samsung cement a new lead with corporate customers around the world, said executives at BlackBerry never fully exploited the company’s popularity in emerging markets – including cashing in on the company’s hugely popular BlackBerry Messenger platform, which allowed users to send messages cheaply over data networks long before WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage and other services.
“The business itself was growing in vast developing economies, not just in Asia-Pacific but everywhere – in , South Africa and other developing markets,†Mr. Wade said.
“Sure, they were lower-end, mid-range devices. But from what I observed, it was really difficult for the company to separate itself from its Western, developed markets and its carrier roots. That’s the challenge. It just didn’t generally understand the markets in developing economies enough to say ‘This is where we’re willing to double down and invest further.’â€Â
