BlackBerry: Seeds of new ideas

Down but not out, BlackBerry's top brass laid out their plans for the next 12 months at Mobile World Congress. Peter Gothard had a front row seat

BlackBerry had an unsurprisingly modest presence at this year's MWC in Barcelona. While the likes of Samsung, Nokia and Huawei screamed and shouted about their wares from their enormous stands in Fira Gran Vira's heaving hallways, BlackBerry positioned itself on the 23rd floor of a remote office building, revealing two new devices and a whole heap of dreams.

CEO John Chen was in fine form, beginning his presentation with the kind of self-deprecating graveyard humour that's winning him friends after 100 days at the helm of BlackBerry.

"Everybody asks me about the Facebook acquisition [of WhatsApp], for $90bn - which we don't have!" he quipped. "Everybody wants to know about BBM."

In his speech, Chen presented a new flagship smartphone, a new budget one, revised licensing and pricing for BES and, finally, some information about new monetisation strategies for BBM, all of which he said were a result of listening to customer feedback, and realising BlackBerry had "spread [itself] too thin" with attempts to focus too much on the consumer market with BlackBerry 10.

Whipping out the new, budget-aimed BlackBerry Z3 - codename Jakarta - Chen said that in "less than three months, we have the phone up and running" after signing a deal with Foxconn in December 2013.

"Sometime in April it will come out in Indonesia, for less than $200", he added.

"It's a 3G phone, but we have a plan to go global with an LTE version of it in the future."

The next device was a more traditional keyboard phone "designed in collaboration with Foxconn", which BlackBerry is calling the Q20.

The phone will restore fan favourite features such as Menu, Back, Send and End buttons, as well as feature an integral trackpad that BlackBerry hopes will speed up use of the phone, as well as introduce a higher degree of precision. The release date for the Q20 is, said Chen, "before the end of the calendar year".

"Most of our customers love our keyboards, and we gave them the keyboard phone - the Q10. But then for some reason, they don't love it anymore," joked Chen.

"It turns out that they liked the belt on top of the keyboard - that's the little track pad, and the return button. And so early on I met with my team, and Foxconn, and decided to listen to our customers and give them back our old productivity tool, with the belt."

Foxconn's Terry Gou said that he considers BlackBerry a "unique asset" for his company, and that Foxconn is "fully committed to supporting" BlackBerry in what will prove to be "a partnership [that] is a major force" in the industry.

John Sims, who joined BlackBerry from SAP at the end of 2013, was up next. As president of global enterprise services, Sims made a wealth of announcements around the BlackBerry Enterprise Server platform, namely that it was being updated straight to BES 12 - a new build of the platform that is designed to bridge users from 5, 7 and 10, with legacy BlackBerry OS compatibility.

BlackBerry: Seeds of new ideas

Down but not out, BlackBerry's top brass laid out their plans for the next 12 months at Mobile World Congress. Peter Gothard had a front row seat

Calling the scheme "EasyPass", BlackBerry promises a free platform upgrade for users as far back as BES 5, instantly batting back criticisms from companies such as Good Technology, who have been trying to capitalise on BlackBerry's prior inflexibility when dealing with existing customers.

All expansion is based on BES - "the unifying foundation", said Sims, promising "seamlessly integrated" performance with "very competitive cross-platform support", including Windows 8. All this before the end of the year.

"We are extending from there and moving to support cross-platform devices, and extending further to provide application enablement and development," while extending security to application developers inside the enterprise, and wider ecosystem, said Sims, hinting that dev ops may start to become a more important part of BlackBerry's business.

More specifically, Sims talked of going "beyond email and PIM [personal application management] to other horizontal applications", as well as moving vertically into regulated services such as healthcare and financial services.

"You should expect to see us expanding our strategy in these directions," said Sims.

Among the Enterprise Suite range, Sims announced Enterprise Protected - "encrypted connection into the enterprise for secure messaging within the enterprise". Apparently, customers are concerned about the use of "general-purpose messaging clients" for chat within their infrastructure. It seems BES, Enterprise Protected and BBM together are being positioned to tackle this problem, if indeed it exists.

Sims added that BlackBerry is "simplifying pricing" on BES: a "silver" subscription, which will offer basic enterprise mobility management (EMM), will cost $19 per user per year, with gold treatment - offering "regulated secure service" - weighing in at $60. Subscriptions or perpetual licences were mooted.

Also, like WhatsApp, BlackBerry will be making BBM a subscription service, in order to begin monetising it more fully.

But when Chen returned to the stage, the real business of the day began. Taking on a more serious demeanour, Chen laid out his dream.

"I'm going to talk about the tent pole - how to get this company back on track," he said.

"It's to do with security - we're always known to be number one in security, and productivity when talking about handset devices. And then we talk about communications."

But besides calling Good Technology, which has currently been directly poaching BlackBerry customers with "free" transfer deals for security solutions, Chen didn't have a lot to offer, except one particular clunker, citing a perceived split of "30/70" in the enterprise between those who want company-provided devices, and those who want to bring their own.

"We recognise that and don't want to lose that market. For the next 18 months you'll be seeing us winning the regulator industry on that 30 per cent we're talking about," he said. Provided that 30 per cent exists.

BlackBerry: Seeds of new ideas

Down but not out, BlackBerry's top brass laid out their plans for the next 12 months at Mobile World Congress. Peter Gothard had a front row seat

Meanwhile, the BBM dream, it turned out, is to continue following "the original plan" of "putting BBM on every phone - every device - there is". This was the first time Chen could perhaps be accused of not being completely straight with the audience.

When BlackBerry 10 launched early in 2013, it seemed that, had the company's all-singing, all-dancing Z10 smartphone have worked out the way the company had hoped, there would certainly be no need to be banging this particularly multi-platform drum. Still, Chen took the opportunity to explain why BBM is better than WhatsApp: futureproofing.

"We believe strongly that the world is moving to a machine-to-machine world. Everyone's going after connected cars," said Chen.

"BBM is beyond just handsets or phones. So it doesn't change our strategy. Our immediate strategy is to put BBM into the hands of the enterprise. Because it's highly secure, and we have a range of products due to come out in the next 12 months that will improve productivity and communication with the enterprise."

This, of course, is where things got vague. But Chen could at least take solace in the previous day's announcement from Nokia that BBM would be a leading light on its new Android-compatible Nokia X device.

"People said not putting BBM on Windows 8 was John Chen's first mistake. Well, I just rectified that mistake," he joked.

But really, would the enterprise still trust BlackBerry after it spent so long trying (and, let's face it, failing) to court the consumer? Did Chen admit damage was done to the loyal enterprise fanbase?

"I think there is certain truth to that statement," he admitted.

"It wasn't about us leaving the enterprise, it was about us being spread a little too thin. We didn't really have everything lined up to be spread that thin.

"I do think that our BB 10 is actually a very good technology. The key is it took me a while to get used to it. With consumers, if it's not intuitively obvious, they get shy, and they don't want to continue on. That's the number one thing that did it - we didn't do enough to educate."

Still, at least Chen has "no plan" for wearables, so that particular tech dead-end can be left to Samsung for the next year.

Asked what his ultimate goal is for 2014, Chen said: "If all these actions and executions, product rollout and engagement is successful, then I should be able to get the company back into cashflow, breaking even by the end of this fiscal year, and be profitable by the end of next fiscal year."

"I'm steadfastly going after that. I'm managing our bottom line. We'll know in a year if that's going to be a reality or not."

BlackBerry's clearly clinging on for dear life right now, but with a slimmed-down, no-nonsense enterprise strategy and a focus on what it's good at - namely EMM and endpoint security - the days of Alicia Keys seem to be well over, at least. Whether there's enough oil left in the can for Chen to put anything into a positive success curve is, of course, something only time can tell.