Comings & Goings: QNX Goes to the Cloud with a New VP at the Helm

If you have been following along, there have been many changes going on at BlackBerry in a relatively short time. Not wanting to lose momentum and stay on track, earlier this month John Chen removed the word “interim” from his title and will remove it until his goal is achieved.

The goal of bringing BlackBerry to its former glory is steadily moving ahead. There have been a lot of changes in BlackBerry’s senior executive staff. There has also been a change in the company’s focus. A change that can be seen as bringing the company back yet forward at the same time.

There is a re-focus on the software security that made BlackBerry so prevalent in government and corporate offices. By making a deal with Foxconn to manufacture and design its smartphones, Chen was able to eliminate three million square feet of office space.

The announcement made yesterday is that QNX is going to the cloud. Chen announced that a new division was being formed as he launched a new cloud business division within QNX. This division will focus on solutions for the Internet of Things.

With this new division, we have a few more changes. Alec Saunders, who formally was the vice president of developer relations for BlackBerry will head the division. Saunders was also the former vice president of marketing at QNX in the early 2000s.

As for the developer relations team, it will transform into something different. Welcome the new global alliances and ecosystems division. This division along with BlackBerry World will be run by vice president Marty Mallick.

While it is true that we have seen and immediately felt some of the changes that Chen has made at the helm of BlackBerry, we shouldn’t expect the same from this move. It may take a while to see what actually happens. QNX has decades of experience behind it.

QNX can be expected to play to its strengths in developing Internet of Things solutions. Keeping in mind that Saunders comes from a QNX background, the match seems to be a perfect fit to keep the momentum moving forward.

The merging of BlackBerry’s developer relations with alliances and ecosystems takes development of BlackBerry 10 software from being a more or less solo project and brings it to an item in a portfolio. We will have to wait and see if this will have any long term effects.