Last week, BlackBerry announced their new QNX Cloud business and that Alec Saunders would be the VP of QNX Cloud.
Over on his blog, Alec has commented on his new position and says that “QNX Cloud is a business focused on building enabling cloud based technologies for Machine to Machine and Internet of Things businesses”.
Interestingly, he says that QNX Cloud is a developer product, first and foremost and targeted at networked and embedded devices.
One thing I am pleased about is when talking about Alec, it will be so much easier describing his title.
Here’s exactly what he had to say:
Last Thursday, news broke that I had accepted a new role as the Vice President of QNX Cloud, a new business unit at QNX (a BlackBerry subsidiary). As an industry we âre closing in on connecting every phone on the planet, maybe 5 billion in total. What;s next? Connecting up all the machines. QNX Cloud is a business focused on building enabling cloud based technologies for Machine to Machine and Internet of Things businesses. QNX Cloud is infrastructure that enables a wide range of connected devices (ranging from automobiles to power plants, consumer electronics, and more) to be managed, updated, and remotely monitored. Our goal is to facilitate so-called “big data” analysis of data coming from these connected devices, and to provide programming interfaces that allow the creation of sophisticated new applications that deliver real business benefit to our customers.
John Chen, writing on Inside BlackBerry, described this move as a “return to his roots”, but I prefer to think of it as a continuation of a path that I have been walking on for most of the past 20 years of my career. A future that, for twenty years, has been coming “one day at a time”. QNX Cloud is a developer product, first and foremost. It’s targeted at networked and embedded devices. To be successful, we’ll need to build an ecosystem, channels to market, and recruit strategic partners. And because it’s a new initiative, it has many characteristics of a start up.
