BlackBerry has long been arguing its future will rely on the ability to manage multiple mobile devices, rather than simply selling handsets. Its newly-announced BlackBerry Experience Suite plays into that story by offering an integrated “desktop” of services for Android, iOS and Windows users.
The full Experience Suite won’t be released until some point later this year. According to BlackBerry, it will include three core components: a productivity suite for email and document management, a communication suite for real-time collaboration, and a security suite to protect that data. Those work elements will run separately from existing apps on the phone or tablet.
That containerisation story is the same approach used by most other vendors in the mobile device management (MDM) space. Last week, we saw Google take a similar approach with its Google At Work strategy. While it’s a realistic strategy, it still requires significant IT effort to ensure the relevant apps are installed on all devices used at work, and blocking access to resources via any alternate path (such as entering email server details into existing mail software).
One other observation? Introducing a new product with the same initials as the existing BlackBerry Enterprise Service is going to cause some confusion.
Introducing the Cross-Platform BlackBerry Experience Suite [BlackBerry Blog]
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