BlackBerry held its Analyst Summit 2017 in San Ramon, California Tuesday, where the main focus was around the Enterprise of Things, noting the growth in IoT, expanding market opportunity and business use cases.
The company guided on major metrics for the coming fiscal year. Management expects overall profitability, with positive free cash flow as well as profitability in each segment.
Management noted that it has $1.6bn in cash ($1bn net cash), and that software revenues are now 2.5x Service revenues.
The company also talked in detail about their new offerings in the space, demoing products, updating business strategy, and detailing customer cases.
The main offerings included a HIPAA-compliant medical social network focused on patients and collaboration, a secure communications and collaboration platform for the banking and finance industry, QNX, BlackBerry Radar, a logistics tracking product currently targeting semi-trailers, a secure communications and collaboration platform for legal offices and AtHoc, the disaster alerting offering.
Athoc connects a physical notification systems (sirens, electronic signage, etc.), to bi-directional automated communication, geofencing and external organizations. The example was given of a major disaster in California where an oil refinery blew up, spreading a toxic cloud over the area. With the prior system, the local subway, BART, was notified and the trains skipped the affected open air depot, which had been closed and locked. However, Cal Train was on a separate system and it dropped its passengers off on this now secured location, locking them into an unsafe environment.
Management specifically noted their strength in security use cases, and identified their Unified Endpoint Management (UEM), Embedded Software (QNX), IoT Applications and licensing (IP portfolio and Brand) as the key to their software pivot.
