BlackBerry Hopes to Bring the Cloud to the Car
Canadian smartphone creator Blackberry seems to be moving into a new direction in 2014. The company has struggled with profitability over the past few years and CEO John Chen believes he can turn the company around by using Blackberry to bring the cloud to automobiles. Blackberry is set to unveil their cloud services inside of a smart car at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show.
Blackberry has officially dubbed the idea as “CES 2014 Technology Concept Car.” Blackberry may have a leg up on the competition within this vertical because its QNX operating system is widely used in many automobiles today. Blackberry’s CEO was asked about technology inside of automobiles. In relation to Blackberry being inside of automobiles, he said that the QNX platform is “Already the dominant machine-to-machine technology of the automotive industry, new capabilities and cloud services are being unveiled at CES in January, and we’re looking toward adjacent verticals for expansion.”
In regards to Blackberry’s future, Chen said, “With a global enterprise customer base exceeding 80,000, we have three times the number of customers compared to Good, AirWatch and MobileIron combined. This makes BlackBerry the leader in mobile-device management. Many in the regulated industries—those with the most stringent security needs—still depend solely on BlackBerry to secure their mobile infrastructure.”
Many consumers and investors are still weary of the Blackberry brand. The company’s stock quote has taken a beating this year while Wall Street has had one of its best years in recent memory. iOS and Android has taken over much of the personal consumer mobile market and it looks as if Blackberry will be unable to penetrate that market again. Blackberry has taken a new approach: instead of trying to reinvent the smart phone, the company has decided to reinvent itself. The cloud will be a big part of that transformation. Blackberry didn’t release too many details on their “CES 2014 Technology Concept Car.” We will have to wait until the unveiling of the car at CES to find out what cloud capabilities Blackberry’s concept car will actually possess.
