That sucking sound you hear is the vacuum that BlackBerry's dramatic collapse has left in the smartphone world. While the company may still be a leader in enterprise security, corporate IT executives are recoiling at the thought of investing in new devices from a company whose clients and investors are jumping ship as though they had first-class cabins on the Titanic. Small wonder, then, that a steady stream of competitors has flooded into the breach, clamouring for the attention of anxious chief information officers.
Mobile telecom gear maker Ericsson posted sales and fourth-quarter operating profit below expectations. In an interview with Reuters, the company's CEO, Hans Vestberg said network projects in China and Russia had not compensated for lower sales in North America and Japan. Hayley Platt reports. Reuters
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Even before Christy Wyatt became the president and CEO of Good Technology-one of the top software security firms soaking up BlackBerry's former enterprise clients-she had discovered first-hand just how vulnerable BlackBerry's hold on the enterprise market really was. The Silicon Valley exec was taking time out at her second home in British Columbia, and getting ready to start a new gig as Citigroup's global head of consumer e-business and mobile technology, when a FedEx package arrived from work. Her new employer had sent her a BlackBerry.
'I was actually a little excited about it,' Wyatt says; the Calgary-born, Okanagan Valley-raised tech veteran (1) hadn't used a BlackBerry in a while, and remembered enjoying the simplicity of the experience. But the U.S. bank's IT department wasn't about to enable any fun. Or, for that matter, much of anything at all. 'Everything was locked. I turned it on, I tried to use it twice and the rest of the time it was in a drawer somewhere,' Wyatt says.
Not long after taking the job at Citi, Wyatt found a new calling. In January of 2013, she took over the helm of Good Technology. The company is one of a handful of firms at the forefront of a rapidly expanding 'bring your own device' software industry that's helping companies open up their computer networks to mobile devices designed in Cupertino, California, in Taiwan and in Seoul-not just in Waterloo.
Anyone with an aging, company-supplied BlackBerry knows the irritation of trying to get work done on a device that's miles behind their personal smartphones and tablets. Tech-savvy employees have also grown increasingly frustrated at not being able to make use of the latest apps on devices that, like Wyatt's BlackBerry, are tightly locked down by IT.
CIOs are between a rock and a hard place: They need to protect the company's data, yet by severely limiting employees' options, they risk users going rogue, putting confidential data onto their unsecured devices.
More and more, companies are turning to Good to provide additional options, and to act as a backup in case BlackBerry suddenly isn't there for them (2). Good's most recent innovation is its Good Dynamics platform.
In addition to allowing employees to securely access their companies' networks on iPhones, iPads, Android devices and other platforms, Good's technology lets users handle work-related data on apps, rather than locking down the whole device, as a number of other mobile device management (MDM) providers do.
Wyatt likes the description of conventional MDM that one of her customers came up with: 'It's sort of like the moat around the castle. You're assuming that you can prevent data from coming on and off the device.' By contrast, one of Good Dynamics' big selling points is that it lets companies' IT departments 'wrap' individual apps so that employees can handle confidential corporate data in them, while being able to use otherwise-unsecured personal devices. Because Good's software secures the data between apps as well as anything going back and forth to the corporate server, IT doesn't have to worry about whether an employee's personal apps give hackers a back-door opportunity to gain access.
Though Good is dwarfed in size by competitors such as Citrix, its customer base is second to none. Clients include numerous global banking giants, such as JPMorgan
Chase, Credit Suisse, Bank of America and Citigroup (3), as well as a broad range of government agencies and other corporations. Good says it activates 5,000 devices with its apps every day.
As a Canadian, does Wyatt feel a bit funny about being the face of the product that some call a 'BlackBerry killer'?
'I guess I don't look at it that way,' she says carefully. 'A lot of our customers-say, any large global bank-they've had BlackBerry for a period of time, and so we've always had this kind of peaceful co-existence. For certain roles and individuals, they'd begin on a BlackBerry device, and for others, the company would use Good. The really big change for us has been in the last couple of months. There's been this conversation coming straight from the CIO, saying, 'Okay, it's time.''
FOOTNOTES
1 Wyatt's track record in tech includes stints in senior roles at Apple, Palm and Motorola
2 BlackBerry's enterprise market share has shrunk from 70% in 2010 to 5% in 2013, says IDC
3 Citigroup was a Good customer before Wyatt signed on as CEO. She became a fan when she used it there
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