Are UC and BB10 BlackBerry's Road Back?Are UC and BB10 BlackBerry's Road Back?

If the company can dig in its heels and stop the ongoing slide, it may be able to start growing again from its remaining loyal base.

Last week I attended the BlackBerry Experience Forum, a traveling roadshow the company is putting on to continue the momentum of the launch of the first BB10 device, the touch screen Z10, in late January. This was the third such event in the U.S. following appearances in San Francisco and Washington, DC, as well as three in Canada. Reports were that the company actually underestimated the crowd they would draw and had to turn people away at some of the locations--the New York event I attended was packed to the gills. The Big Apple is home to countless financial and investment firms, many of whom are wedded to BlackBerry for its security capabilities--and lots of their employees carry two phones.

Refreshingly, this was a new BlackBerry we were hearing from. While no one sang "Ding dong, the witch is dead" to acknowledge the departure of Messrs. Balsillie and Lazaridis, BlackBerry's VP and Managing Director for the U.S., Richard Piasentin, took the stage and claimed that over the past year, "We have reinvented the product and reinvented the company."

The release of the first BB10 devices was more than a year overdue--the touchscreen Z10 should be available in the U.S. in late March, and the qwerty-equipped Q10 about a month later. Still, the product struck me as being "complete."

Mr. Piasentin talked up the "fun" factor in the new BlackBerry, and showed off neat features like the time shift camera that essentially takes a 3-second "movie" every time you snap a picture so that you can select faces and find the best expressions within that time window. BB10 also offers an integrated notebook-like function called Remember, that is accessible from any application. However, on the Business Track where I spent most of my time, the discussion was centered squarely on "business."

The bulk of the coverage we have seen on the new BlackBerry focused on the devices, but the launch also included the new BlackBerry Exchange Server 10 (BES 10); all existing BES licenses are upgradeable to BES 10 at no cost. Note the company has abandoned the name "Fusion" (or "Con-Fusion" as Senior Director for Enterprise Product Management Jeff Holleran quipped), but the new platform will support earlier versions of the BlackBerry OS, BB 10, Playbook, as well as Apple and Android devices.

When managing iOS and Android devices, BES 10 will be limited to the same range of functions as other MDM suppliers, but the integration with BlackBerry Balance demonstrates the importance of having full control of the MDM platform as well as the device. Balance is BlackBerry's integrated dual-persona capability, allowing a secure managed compartment for business information along with a personal section. To shift between the two, the user touches the middle of the home screen and drags down to expose "Personal" and "Business" buttons; you can also define different backgrounds so the user can tell immediately which section they are in.

Any data (e.g., emails, contacts, calendar entries, etc.) that is accessed on the business side is tagged and cannot be forwarded or even cut-and-pasted to the personal side. If the user leaves the company, the business side can be wiped remotely and the personal side is untouched.

For me, the most interesting presentation was by Product Management/Solutions Development Managers Andrew Short and Jeff Kuckelman, who showed off BlackBerry Collaboration Services (BCS) and the Mobile Voice System (MVS) fixed-mobile convergence solution. BCS is essentially BlackBerry's UC and collaboration solution that offers many of the same capabilities we see in other UC mobile clients, including functions like click-to-join a conference and the ability to escalate from a text session to a call. While BCS is powered by the BlackBerry itself, it does federate with the text services of Microsoft Lync and IBM Sametime, and those messages flow directly into the always-accessible BlackBerry Hub.

Messrs. Short and Kuckelman indicated, for the first time, that the MVS, which supports BlackBerry devices exclusively, may add support for iOS and Android devices at some point in the future. MVS attaches to any PBX (although it is more tightly coupled with Cisco and Mitel) and provides features similar to ShoreTel Mobility or NEC's uMobility, including single-number reach, mobile number protection, and the ability to carry calls on either Wi-Fi or cellular services and transparently hand calls off from one environment to the other.

Given the growing importance of BYOD and the low probability of BlackBerry's gaining major traction in the consumer space, I can't see the gang from Waterloo regaining its former position in the mobile device market. However, the new product line-up can serve as an effective "holding strategy"--provided that overzealous BES administrators aren't allowed to squeeze every drop of "fun" out of the new BB10 user experience.

Hopefully BlackBerry can convince the "totalitarians" of mobile device management that the combination of BES 10 and the integrated security capabilities of BlackBerry Balance will allow even extremely security-sensitive organizations to maintain the protections they need without turning the new, more engaging BB10-based device into "a rock in your pocket."

And I'm happy to report that after being absent for several years, BlackBerry will be exhibiting at next week's Enterprise Connect, and John Cash, Senior Manager, Enterprise Accounts will participate in our Mobile UC Summit, UC Mobile Devices, and Tablet Tactics sessions.

For those of us who see UC&C as a game-changing development in enterprise networking, BlackBerry's offerings are important, as the company seems to have gone back to its enterprise roots and shows a genuine understanding of what UC&C is about. If the company can dig in its heels and stop the ongoing slide, it may be able to start growing again from its remaining loyal base. It will be a tough pull, but as that great UC sage Yogi Berra once said, "It ain't over 'til it's over."

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