Back in June during the BlackBerry earnings call a new app called BBM Meetings made an appearance. Since then, there hasn't been a ton of info about it relayed by BlackBerry but like all the other BBM initiatives BlackBerry has been working on such as BBM Protected, BBM Money, Cross-platform BBM, BBM Channels, BBM stickers, BBM Meetings is still well on its way according to BlackBerry's President for Global Enterprise Solutions, John Sims who spoke of the value-added service recently with The Jakarta Post and dropped a few more details on what it's all about.

Our strategy is to continue to expand the capability of our best server, our BlackBerry enterprise server. For example, we have a new release that is coming out in November, and in addition to supporting iOS and Android, BlackBerry will also support Windows Phone.

So, we are expanding the number of platforms for varied use, we are expanding capability; we are making it a much more scalable platform. We are also enabling it to be used in the cloud as well as on premises […] we call them value-added services, additional enterprise-focused, value-added services.

For example, with BlackBerry Messenger [BBM], we have taken BBM and we have created a version specifically for enterprises, called BBM Protected. We launched that in June and then we expanded it in August, and we will expand it again before the end of the year. BBM Protected allows secure chat inside the enterprise and it allows those chats to be locked.

We will [also] soon be launching something called BBM Meetings. It is a service that allows voice and video conferences for groups of about 25 people.

It will initially be launched as an enterprise service this year and we will also expand it to the consumer market sometime next year […] It will have a presence on BlackBerry devices, iOS and Android. It will be on tablets and we will also have a desktop version.

The first part was pretty much assumed. The name alone gave that away. However, the last part is interesting. BBM Meetings will initially go out as an enterprise solution, which will eventually hit the consumer market and while it's not directly noted, it does seem as though adding this sort of value-added service into BlackBerry Blend would make sense. In any case, stand alone app or built into BlackBerry Blend, we now have a slightly better idea of what BBM Meetings is and how it can help extend BBM even further.

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