Over the weekend it was interesting to see analyst firm Gartner put out a recommendation that enterprises find alternatives for BlackBerry in the next 6 months. With BlackBerry doubling down on enterprise especially with Fairfax financial aiming for that market this is some bad news. Some of the Gartner findings (via CIO.com) are pretty harsh including:
"BlackBerry isn’t going to disappear overnight and there’s probably a six month window to consider and then implement alternatives."
"Gartner recommends that our [BlackBerry enterprise] clients take no more than six months to consider and implement alternatives to BlackBerry. We’re emphasizing that all clients should immediately ensure they have backup mobile data management plans and are at least testing alternative devices to BlackBerry."
BlackBerry responded to CIO.com and Gartner this week with the following statement:
We recognize and respect external parties’ opinions on BlackBerry’s recent news. However, many of the conclusions by Gartner about the potential impact of a sale or other strategic alternatives, are purely speculative.
BlackBerry is restructuring and pursuing strategic alternatives to increase its focus on its core enterprise business. We remain steadfast in our mission to deliver the most secure and powerful mobile management solutions and smartphones to our customers.
That commitment has been met with support from enterprises adopting BlackBerry and BES 10, which has more than 25,000 commercial and test servers installed to date, up from 19,000 in July.
BES 10 is also the only EMM [Enterprise Mobile Management] platform to be awarded ‘Authority to Operate’ on U.S. Department of Defense Networks. Everyone at BlackBerry is grateful for the ongoing support of our customers, and we are working harder than ever to keep it.
Not the strongest statements from BlackBerry but hopefully they will follow up with more if they plan on focusing the company on the enterprise market. What do you think?
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