The IT Nerd

There were a couple of significant events today in the world of BlackBerry:

• BES 12 was announced today. It allows one to manage iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BB10 and legacy BBOS devices from one application. Pricing is per-device. The BES 12 Silver tier will cost $25 per device per year, or $45 per device per year with premium support. The BES 12 Gold tier, which provides additional security features, will cost $80 per device per year, or $100 per device per year with premium support. Additional features, like the newly announced BBM Meetings, can be added to either tier at an additional top-up price.
• BlackBerry teamed up with Samsung to “provide end to end security for Android.” Now it does make sense for both these companies to link up. Samsung who sells the most Android phones has the KNOX security platform which not many people have implemented. BlackBerry who are the go to people for security will support KNOX via BES 12. That will give those who have invested in Samsung devices a reason to use KNOX.
• WorkLife for BlackBerry was also announced. It will allow enterprises to add a separate corporate number to BYOD devices. That way corporate voice, SMS, and data usage be charged to the company, while all other usage is charged to the employee.
• A new VPN authentication tool was announced today which provides two-factor authentication to mobile employees via their network credentials rather than hardware tokens to access secure information.
• Salesforce and Brightstar are now BlackBerry partners.
• The BlackBerry Classic is now available for pre-order. It will launch on December 17th.

Investors liked this news as the stock was up 7% today. It’s safe to say that’s a good sign for BlackBerry.

This entry was posted on November 13, 2014 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags BlackBerry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.