The rapid rise of Android-based smartphones was a prominent factor in BlackBerry’s profound decline. Now BlackBerry is counting on some Android phones to ensure its future.
BlackBerry announced on Thursday that Samsung would use server and phone management software as well as BlackBerry’s unique global network to improve security for Android phones and tablets aimed at government users.
There is such historic animosity between BlackBerry and Samsung that while making the announcement at an event in San Francisco, John Sims, the president of BlackBerry’s corporate and government services unit, joked about the improbability of executives from both companies sharing a stage, a sentiment echoed by Greg Wade, a vice president of Samsung.
BlackBerry has boasted that its network and software, as well as special hardware within its phones, provide a level of security for corporate and government users that its competitors cannot match. Opening up some of those components to Samsung, which last year challenged BlackBerry with a security service known as Knox, may now erode some of BlackBerry’s handset sales advantage.
But Jan Dawson, the principal of Jackdaw Research, said the move by BlackBerry was unavoidable and would be positive for the company.
“This isn’t a concession of defeat as much as it’s a concession to reality – most people aren’t going to choose BlackBerry devices and so BlackBerry needs to find a way to make its management solutions relevant beyond its own devices,” Mr. Dawson wrote in an email from the BlackBerry presentation. “BlackBerry’s handset business is a tiny fraction of what it once was, and that’s not going to change whatever happens.”
John S. Chen, who became BlackBerry’s chief executive about a year ago, has said that he planned to shift the company’s focus to software and service. At Thursday’s session, he repeated a promised to double BlackBerry’s annual software revenue of $250 million by next year.
Samsung will use a new form of BlackBerry’s software, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 12, which was also introduced on Thursday. Mr. Chen acknowledged that the previous version of the company’s management software “disrupted the flow of our business” with corporate and government customers. The new version adds additional security features and will allow users to control and management wireless communications with devices well beyond phones like medical equipment. It will work with iPhones, Android phones, like the previous software, and add older BlackBerrys and Microsoft Windows Phone 8. Subscription fees for the software, ranging from $19 to $60 a year for each user, will be crucial to Mr. Chen’s ambitious sales goal.
Mr. Dawson said that the deal with BlackBerry will not provide Samsung’s Knox with all of the Canadian company’s security features, adding: “I’m sure BlackBerry would still argue that its own devices are the most secure.”
Looking back on his first year at BlackBerry, Mr. Chen recalled that he once “unwisely” told a reporter that his wife used a Samsung Android phone.
“Now I feel somewhat redeemed,” he said.