BlackBerry’s president of global enterprise services John Sims came out today to explain their crucial decision to open up BB10 management to other MDMs. This has always been a big differentiator for BlackBerry since they were tightly integrated between the BES and device hardware. Now they are letting others compete in this space.
Sims assures us that this is not BlackBerry throwing in the towel but rather deciding to compete on strengths. This also allows BlackBerry 10 addition at companies that do not have a BES.
Here is how Sims described it:
We’re making this strategic move to continue providing the most open and flexible mobile environments for our customers. We’ve expanded our BES10 and BBM messaging platform to include iOS and Android, and later this year we will add Windows Phone. And, with the help of our partners we hope to continue to provide customers increased flexibility and choice in their mobile device environments.
MDM has become table stakes; it is no longer a meaningful point of differentiation. The differentiation for BlackBerry in the future will be our ability to enable secure, productive mobile communications, collaboration and other applications. Additionally, we remain the only company who can provide customers the flexibility to choose between any of the popular policy models such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and Corporate Owned Personally Enabled (COPE).
Check out the full interview here. What do you think of the move?
