Geoffrey Moore, a legend in marketing high-tech products, watched BlackBerry CEO John Chen lead Sybase out of the red by moving the software company aggressively into the mobile-data space.
“So I wouldn’t count BlackBerry out,” Moore said in a phone interview. “I certainly never would count John Chen out of any game.”
Moore is one of the speakers at Communitech’s 2014 Tech Leadership Conference on May 29 at Bingemans.
“I know John Chen extremely well, because he and I worked closely together when he was at Sybase,” Moore said.
Under Chen’s leadership, Sybase returned to profitability in 2000, stayed that way for 55 consecutive quarters and was sold to SAP in 2010 for $5.8 billion. At its low point, Sybase had a market capitalization of $362 million.
“I watched John Chen take that hand at Sybase,” Moore said. “He just fought his way back into the game. He couldn’t catch the very next wave, but he caught the wave after that and he got back into mobile in a different way, around more the enterprise infrastructure for mobile.”
>”He was able to recapture momentum in the analytics category, which was very lucrative and funded him well for the short- to medium-term,” Moore said.
Moore said he speaks with 100 to 300 chief information officers a year and they would all welcome a system that can handle professional and personal mobile devices, across all platforms.
The last thing CIOs want to do is cobble together software from Apple, Google and Microsoft to manage their employees’ mobile devices, he said.
“I think that’s the playbook, at least a start down that road. There is so much work to be done. There is so much opportunity in that space.”
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