Only a little more than a week ago we heard that Andrew Bocking, the former Executive VP in charge of BBM, was leaving BlackBerry. I didn’t see it coming. Initially there was some debate about whether Bocking quit of his own volition or was let go. Kevin updated the original news post with confirmation that he did choose to leave on his on terms. As for the reason, we're not yet sure. The cross-platform release may have taken bit longer than expected, but there is no real argument about the quality of the end product. It’s solid, people love it, and Bocking is ultimately responsible for that result.
What I find interesting, though, is that John Chen decided to put John Sims in charge of BBM. Recall that Sims is the new head Global Enterprise Solutions. But isn’t BBM a consumer product? Yes, it is, and I happen to think it’s a product that has massive opportunity in the enterprise. Right now there doesn’t seem to be any dominant secure enterprise-grade IM platform, and given BlackBerry’s obvious focus on the enterprise market it makes total sense to me that they’d beef up the offering and start selling corporate end-user licenses to an enhanced version of BBM.
Here’s where I’d like to turn over the discussion to CrackBerry Nation. Many of you guys and gals are corporate users. You have a pretty good idea of what features you’d like to see in the enterprise. What are your top 3? Drop a comment below and tell us what you think would make enterprise-grade BBM a killer app?
I think there’s no question this is a business BlackBerry can monetize.
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