A year ago Blackberry was in what appeared to be terminal decline and attempts to find new owners failed. Newly-appointed CEO John Chen sought to turnaround the company by reconnecting to its core enterprise customers, stemming the losses that were haemorrhaging the company, and outsourcing manufacturing to China’s Foxconn. The rather bizarrely shaped Blackberry Passport phone has been somewhat emblematic of Mr Chen’s first year at the company – slightly more successful than expected. One pillar of Blackberry’s overall strategy that hasn’t been talked about much, but is now beginning to get some attention is its foray in the Internet of Things.
In May, Blackberry announced Project Ion, a series of initiatives designed to give it a leadership in the Internet of Things to match Google’s position in the Web or Twitter’s dominance of news generation. This initiative was to focus on three platforms, which I will comment upon separately:
1. A secure application platform
Making use of its QNX technology and Blackberry enterprise mobility platform, this is clearly a strong point for Blackberry. The QNX operating system is pervasive in a very wide range of industrial embedded devices used in (amongst other) factories, machinery, medical applications, cars and power plants. The key selling point of QNX is that it is designed to be meet the severe reliability and security requirements of these applications, and is intrinsically more secure than equivalent Android systems. Similarly, Blackberry has recently released its latest incarnation of its mobility management platform, BES 12 (Blackberry Enterprise Service) which was designed to truly open up to all major mobile platforms, and operate both in the cloud and on company premises. Extending Blackberry’s gold-standard security technology to provide the infrastructure for enterprise and industrial device connectivity can put Blackberry in a very strong position in this growth category.
2. Facilitation of an Internet of Things Ecosystem
Ecosystems and Blackberry are not words that are naturally associated with each other. Traditionally, the Blackberry enterprise mobility solution was a closed Blackberry-only solution, encompassing backend infrastructure and handsets, and it has been only more recent guises has Blackberry opened up its system to other device vendors. Having said that, Blackberry is now firmly well en route to being a software and services company, for which a vibrant supporting ecosystem is a mandatory requirement for success.
3. Strategic Partnerships
Blackberry has described its participation in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) as key to its strategy in this space. With 98 members (according to its website), the IIC is definitely the largest of the main IoT standards groups – at least in terms of membership. Although this consortium has kicked off working groups on system architecture, security and data sharing, no tangible deliverables have been published, indicating that this activity may run at a slower pace than those initiatives targeted at the consumer space.
So what is the outlook?
To date, not much has been publicly disclosed about Project Ion, and much that is discussed online is fairly speculative. Nevertheless, this strategy brings Blackberry’s traditional strength in device management and best-in-class security platforms to a segment that will see significant growth. For example, the benefits that can be achieved by connecting a large number of medical devices to centralised servers will only be realised if the security of the system, and patients’ privacy can be guaranteed. Similarly, most industrial operations, including transport, manufacturing, and power distribution can cause catastrophic economic, human and environmental damage if their networks are compromised, and their operators will be exceedingly cautious as they transition towards the industrial internet. In all these cases, Blackberry’s expertise and reputation can be harnessed to good use. Indeed, the slower pace of the Industrial Internet, as compared to some of the initiatives in the consumer space should give Blackberry time to develop a strong position.
In line with Blackberry’s IoT strategy, this post has ignored the consumer space. However, I don’t feel that this should be discounted in the mid-term. As the recent well-publicised webcam hacks clearly show, connecting smart devices, appliances and other home automation products to the Internet brings risks, of which we are probably only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The tools and technology that Blackberry will develop to secure the industrial internet, may well have equal or even greater value in securing the smart home.