BlackBerry has every right to own the mobile and security space

BlackBerry’s chief operating officer (COO) Marty Beard spoke at the GoodExchange Cyber Security Summit 2015 in London today and boldly stated that BlackBerry have every right to claim the mobile and security space as their own.

“We feel like we have every right to own the mobile and mobile security space. Just as people identify the Nike brand with fitness, we want people to identify our brand with mobile security and privacy,”

Beard reiterated the new company strategy, saying that software is a major part of its business and this is likely to continue to grow.

“Between 20% and 25% of our business is currently software. We see this as a business that amounts to at least $500bn in our fiscal year. It has been growing in double digits and is something we are investing in heavily,” he said.

 

Beard said many of the recent acquisitions had been aimed at rounding out its security capabilities.

“While we have always had secure email and messaging, we felt that we needed secure voice, especially for customers in government and regulated industries, so we now have the capability to do encrypted voice calls,” 

Another gap BlackBerry identified was file sharing, which was the reason behind its acquisition of secure enterprise file sync-and-share supplier WatchDox.

“We have been investing on the enterprise side pretty aggressively, which is something we will continue to do wherever we see an opportunity,” 

Beard told the audience of predominantly Good users that BlackBerry thinks of the deal with Good Technology more as a merger than an acquisition.

“Good Technology has an incredible core platform and an incredible multi-operating system capability and we bring a lot of strength in mobile device management as well, so it’s a good marriage,”

According to Beard, Good Technology is unlikely to be the last acquisition.

Beard said BlackBerry is determined that the BlackBerry Priv, the company’s first  ever Android device, will bring something new to the market, which will be available in the UK in ” the coming weeks”.

“We worked really hard for a long time on adding our security layer in a unique way on top of Android, as well as giving the user the ability to control the privacy,”