BlackBerry: Apple and IBM partnership is like 'two elephants dancing'
BlackBerry isn’t losing any sleep over the recent enterprise tie-up between IBM and Apple as their CEO John Chen compared it to a couple of large mammals taking to the dance floor.
Chen, talking to the Financial Times, likened the partnership to when "two elephants start dancing" and thinks that the firm he is slowly rebuilding has enough in the bag to compete with anyone that challenges it in the enterprise market.
Rumors persist that it is ready to sign up with its own enterprise partners and Chen stoked the fire by giving an inkling that it is ready to start dancing with its own beau, with the CEO remaining coy on who it could be. That hasn’t stopped various observers speculating that the likes of SAP, Oracle or even Samsung could be a-party to some kind of tie-up.
"A good enterprise partner for them might be an SAP or an Oracle," says Joe Compeau, a lecturer in information systems at the Ivey Business School, according to The Globe and Mail. "Security is a little more important part of those systems, so BlackBerry would be a natural fit".
The deal signed between IBM and Apple is expected to bring iPhones and iPad into the enterprise sector with a range of secured apps that leverage each side’s expertise and at the time the deal was signed, BlackBerry’s share price dived.
BlackBerry has been busy in the past week with the release of the first-ever cloud-hosted version of its BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 that means customers don’t have to maintain individual BES10 servers. It followed this up with the appointment of Marty Beard as new COO, a man that worked closely with Chen at Sybase and has also been employed by Oracle.
"What it needs [is] to find a company that can really accelerate its software agenda," added technology analyst Carmi Levy, someone that believes huge app libraries will matter more to consumers but less so in the enterprise sector. "It’s about how many business-relevant solutions you can create".
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