Comings & Goings: Former HTC/Sony Ericsson Exec is Hired by BlackBerry

Ever since John Chen took over as BlackBerry’s CEO, there has been a lot of house cleaning going on. Quite a few top executives have been let go and several new faces have taken over. There have also been a lot of other changes since the beginning of November when Chen took hold of the reins.

Today we have another addition to the BlackBerry executive staff. Ron Louks has been hired. At one time Louks was chief strategy officer at HTC and he also had a stint as CTO at Sony Ericsson. The latest position that Louks held was CEO of OpenNMS, which is a network management software developer.

You can see that he has been involved in the telecom industry for some time now. He will be the head of the devices and emerging solutions unit for BlackBerry as president. This actually brings up a rather interesting question.

A couple of weeks ago on December 20, 2013, Chen mentioned "The most immediate challenge for the company is how to transition the devices operations to a more profitable business model." This statement was almost immediately followed by an announcement that BlackBerry was entering into a five year partnership with Foxconn.

Foxconn is the Taiwanese company that is known for assembling Apple devices among others. So the question is, if Foxconn will jointly develop and manufacture certain new BlackBerry devices and manage the inventory of them in its many factories in China, as stated by BlackBerry, what will Ron Louks be doing?

There is speculation that Louks will be in the position in order to facilitate the transition to BlackBerry devices being manufactured outside. This of course also raises the question as to hold long will this position be needed.

According to BlackBerry, he’ll be tasked with turning around a hardware business that has seen its device shipments nosedive over the last year. Chen said “Ron will focus on BlackBerry’s long-term product road map, including hardware, software and design, as well as the company’s joint development efforts.”

Chen also made the following comment: “On our path to return BlackBerry to profitability, nothing is more important than remaining deeply connected to our customers, and designing and delivering secure products that exceed their expectations.”

I have been speculating for almost a year now that BlackBerry wants to move away from devices and get down to strengthening its software. It has made a lot of changes to its Enterprise Server (BES), BlackBerry has also been working on taking its software products cross platform to include Android and iOS.

I’m just not seeing room for devices in this scenario. I guess that only time will tell as to what Chen has up his sleeve for the future of BlackBerry.