BlackBerry's Enterprise Mobility Management Solution Goes Cross-Platform on the Cloud

As of late, we have seen BlackBerry suffer through an increasing list of bad news. There have been major layoffs with a report of more to come. The first two quarter results for 2014 have been pretty dismal. To top it all off, the new BlackBerry 10 devices are not selling like hotcakes.

Throughout all of this, however, there is one thing that BlackBerry has always been one of, if not the best at: security. There is a reason why for so many uninterrupted years BlackBerry was not only the choice of major corporations, but also the choice of many governments including the U.S.

At a recent event, BlackBerry previewed a new multi-platform enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution. What makes this different is that it is a cloud-based solution. It will enable businesses to easily secure and manage corporate and personal devices.

This becomes a very important area of security and controls with the proliferation of bring your own devices (BYOD) to work. It is undeniable that more and more employees are given the opportunity to use BYOD to select their work device of choice. In fact, Gartner predicts that half of employers will require employees to supply their own device for work purposes by 2017.


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With this move, BlackBerry seems to be returning to its roots. BlackBerry’s new multi-platform EMM cloud solution is designed to offer businesses mobile device management (MDM), mobile application management (MAM), security standards, and self-service capabilities for the end-user. This is what really made BlackBerry a corporate name.

According to this morning’s announcement, some of the key features that the new cloud-based EMM service will offer are:

• Simple and fast deployment. No server hardware or software to install, just register and go.
• Administrators can easily manage and secure smartphones and tablets. The simple Web-based admin console will provide easy activation and deployment of BlackBerry, iOS and Android smartphones, app management, security policy configuration and compliance monitoring.
• Administrators can secure, deploy and manage apps. Administrators will be able to build a catalog of public apps from the App StoreSM, Google Play and the BlackBerry World storefront, and then view app distribution and usage for all users and devices. End-users can manage their own devices through the self-service console.
• End-users will be able to easily perform common management tasks such as setting up or changing device passwords and remote wipe and lock without relying on an administrator, giving them independence and saving on helpdesk calls.

Stephen Bates, head of the enterprise business unit at BlackBerry, made the following comments: “BlackBerry is evolving. As the industry has adopted BYOD and mixed mobile environments, we’ve responded with our multi-platform EMM solution. The new cloud-based EMM solution will bring all the benefits of our on-premise offering, which is trusted by more businesses and governments around the world than any other enterprise mobility solution, to customers as a cloud service that lets them easily manage BlackBerry, iOS and Android devices more cost efficiently than ever before.”

Currently, the new cloud-based EMM solution is undergoing beta testing. The service should be available as a single monthly subscription. This will cover both the license and technical support. If all goes to plan you can expect to see the service made available by the end of November 2013.

I have suspected for some time now that the only way for BlackBerry to move on is to focus on what it has always been good at, and that is security. This is a reason that for so many years, people carried two mobile devices. The second device was always a BlackBerry smartphone used only for corporate business and nothing else.