BlackBerry Lays Off Developer Relations Staff – Vivek Bhardwaj Also Recently Parted Ways

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BlackBerry is really marching to the enterprise drum. According to The Spec (and confirmed by BlackBerry) the developer relations team has been laid off in Waterloo. This is about 65 people in the team and comes right after their decision to use the Amazon App Store to fill the consumer app gap while BlackBerry focuses on enterprises. BlackBerry confirmed that this decision was made to:

"realign resources to focus on new programs that will drive enterprise application development. We recognize our local employees’ hard work on behalf of our company, and the difficulty of this news. And we will do everything in our power to treat our employees with compassion while offering support during this time of transition."

At the last shareholder meeting Blackberry confirmed that they are at the end of cutbacks and are looking to hire about 300 new employees in new roles. This is all about restructuring around their enterprise focus.

BlackBerry also lost Vivek Bhardwaj this past month from his post as head of the software portfolio. From what I hear he was just burned out and decided it was time to take a break before moving on to something new.

Hopefully this all helps in BlackBerry’s restructuring. Either way its hard to not notice the change at BlackBerry and sadly see the familiar faces no longer with the firm. From what I hear there are still a few more coming as they right-size.

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