BlackBerry announced that they have entered into a $1-billion investment agreement and a new CEO was announced, John. While it’s perhaps not the ideal result for the company – success in finding a partner willing to effectively buy it out and go private would have removed it from the limelight of the stock market and given it breathing room from investors, in some sense – finding a consortium willing to put up one billion dollars to back your company is likely not the worst possible result either. However, with that, this effectively means that they will be lead by a new fresh leader, probably with a totally different ideology, or what some might call reborn.

Now, looking at who has chosen been for as the Interim CEO: John S Chen, it would have probably hinted to us as to the likely future of the company: software and services.

Back then, John Chen was formerly in charge of Sybase, an enterprise software and services company dealing in management, analytics and data warehousing. What followed was that John Chen left the company two and half years after it was bought by SAP after 15 years running the business, and it was worth more than 6 times its original value. Hence, clearly he knows something about enterprise software and services.

Whether or not BlackBerry does plan on going down the software and services route with full commitment is unknown at this point of time, but now with ‘a software guy’ now firmly in charge, this is a real possibility.

Whilst enterprise software makes up a bulk of BlackBerry’s income, consumer’s also do play a big part and it will be interesting to see how this segment plays out for them, since he did mention that he will keep it running, for now.