BlackBerry CEO Gives Enterprise Customers Some Assurances In Latest Open Letter

Soon after BlackBerry completed the top management transition that came as a part and parcel of the $1 billion institutional investment led by Fairfax Financial Holdings, the company’s new CEO John S. Chen penned an open letter to customers telling them that BlackBerry has substantial financial resources to keep it afloat. Chen today wrote a letter to the company’s enterprise customers, without a doubt its backbone, assuring them that BlackBerry is “very much alive,” and that they shouldn’t pay much attention to rival mobile device management or MDM firms telling them to switch from BES because BlackBerry’s future is uncertain.

Chen writes that the company has taken off its “for sale” sign and is currently focusing on its roots, which includes handsets, EMM solutions, cross-platform messaging and embedded systems. He also mentions that BlackBerry’s EMM customer base is larger than any other vendor in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management and that it continues to grow, that its enterprise solutions manage more mobile devices than any other vendor and the fact that BlackBerry isn’t a small VC backed MDM company that needs additional funding every year. Chen says that the company knows that “BlackBerry devices are not for everyone,” and that its ok because BES10 supports multi-platform MDM, security and mobile application management so even if a company doesn’t deploy BlackBerry devices, it can use the company’s enterprise solutions to deploy iOS and Android devices. BlackBerry definitely needs to retain as many customers, both enterprise and individual as it can because its not going to be an easy road to recovery for the ailing Canadian manufacturer.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: General
Tags: BlackBerry