In November 2014, BlackBerry announced a strategic partnership with Samsung that allowed Samsung’s enterprise-grade phones to be managed remotely by BES12.
“One of the aspects that really attracts us to the BlackBerry platform is just how embedded it is with the enterprise,” Greg Wade, Samsung’s vice-president of enterprise business, told The Australian Financial Review.
According to Samsung and BlackBerry, device management platforms that large enterprises use now to manage fleets of mobile phones, tablets and PCs are going to trickle down soon into ordinary households so consumers can monitor and manage securely their fleet of washing machines, fridges, clothes dryers and entertainment devices.
“Fast-forward five years down the track to the world of Internet of Things. You’ll have washing machines, dryers, fridges, TVs, your power usage, your internet usage ,” BlackBerry ANZ managing director Matt Ball says.
“Each household will have at least 30, 40, 50 different connected devices. In the historical context, that’s a pretty decent-sized SMB customer . . . It’s not inconceivable that you might have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for each household,” he says.
But with so many manageable devices beginning to appear in households, many of them from Samsung, that Samsung and BlackBerry partnership could extend to offering enterprise-grade management platforms to ordinary consumers, Mr Wade says.
“It makes good sense to have a central point that allows you to manage all of the aspects of your connected life. But that’s something we’re still trying to understand,” he says.
