Now this is starting to get a little interesting. Earlier last year, John laid out the plans for BlackBerry at CNBC, and made a pretty bold statement on BlackBerry Enterprise Service. Indeed, with all bold statements, it does make rivals feel the heat and evidently, they are responding in panic.
In the interview on CNBC, BlackBerry’s CEO John Chen highlighted a very important statistic which seemed to have avoided the eye of almost all the critics:
When it comes to enterprise, we’re still the leader. Don’t be fooled by the competition’s rhetoric claiming to be more secure or having more experience than BlackBerry.
BlackBerry has a global enterprise customer base of over 80,000. With that, BlackBerry actually has three times the number of customers compared to Good, AirWatch, and MobileIron combined!
Now, today, AirWatch, Good Technology and MobileIron have hit back at BlackBerry after being called out by BlackBerry CEO John Chen in a memo which stated that BlackBerry was the leader in mobile device management.
Ojas Rege, VP strategy at MobileIron, cited the Gartner report and noted that the real question wasn’t the number of companies using BlackBerry – more whether firms will deploy fewer BlackBerry devices by the end of 2014 and what MDM solution will be used to secure non-BlackBerry devices:
BlackBerry is a device company building devices that most employees no longer want.
Rege said.
BlackBerry has a fundamental conflict of interest providing multi-OS MDM, because the better they secure iOS or Android, the less BlackBerry devices will be sold. Would you trust a device manufacturer to do a great job managing devices made by their competitors?
A statement from AirWatch:
BlackBerry lacks comprehensive security for smart devices, since it doesn’t receive the support of other major device manufacturers that also compete with its handsets. These additional layers of security are essential for any business or government agency looking to truly protect sensitive corporate information on modern mobile devices. The steep reduction in workforce will also make it very difficult to catch up and keep up with the speed of innovation coming from other device manufacturers
Christy Wyatt, CEO of Good Technology, took a different view, saying she had a huge amount of respect for the BlackBerry technology legacy, and agreed that pure play MDM is not a feasible solution for companies today.
Our focus continues to be where the puck is going, not where it used to be, and the MDM model has proven to be too limiting for users. CIOs today are deploying cross-platform solutions that offer leading enterprise-grade security, on the devices that their employees want, without sacrificing user experience
In conclusion, MobileIron and AirWatch is evidently just playing around with their own words and trying to justify their products need to exist, which sounds more like a panic reply and more of a sulky reply. On the other hand, Christy from Good Technology is much more comprehensive and professional in the reply.
