This is a gut-punch sign of the changing times at BlackBerry. They have just announced that BlackBerry Live 2014 will not be held next year in favor of smaller events throughout the year. This means BlackBerry’s big event of the year is no longer after 12 years. That is a real shame since that was the most powerful event BlackBerry had every year for their enterprise customers and more recently for regular customers.
Check out the announcement below:
BlackBerry events have always been purpose-driven, designed to help get your hands on new products, get familiar with our services, to learn about our future plans and roadmaps, and to demonstrate the powerful capabilities of BlackBerry platforms. Over the past decade, we’ve held a wide range of events to achieve these goals, ranging from niche industry trade shows all the way up to major conferences like the BlackBerry Jam developer conference series and BlackBerry Live.
We’ve taken a look at how to best meet our goals with BlackBerry events, and today we’re announcing that we will not be hosting a BlackBerry Live conference in 2014.
Instead, we’re planning to continue with an engaging lineup of smaller, targeted events taking place all around the world over the next 12 months. These events are designed with a greater focus on the specific business, developer, and partner audiences, and will allow you to get the most out of your attendance.
First introduced as the Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES) in 2002 and most recently as BlackBerry Live, we held 12 fantastic events. Beginning as an enterprise-centric industry event, the conference grew to cover all aspects of BlackBerry and serve all audiences – one of the reasons that we’ll be focusing our efforts to a greater degree moving forward.
We want to take this opportunity to celebrate BlackBerry Live and all of the amazing memories that we have, as well as collecting a few of yours. Share your favorite experience from the last decade of BlackBerry Live events in the comments below, or tweet them to @BlackBerry4Biz.
You can also check out the BlackBerry Live web site at www.blackberrylive.com for a look at some of the incredible conference moments over the years. We’ll all miss BlackBerry Live, but we’ll certainly be seeing you soon!
