Desktop video chat will soon be coming to the enterprise version of BlackBerry Messenger (eBBM), however, nothing yet to the consumer version, according to John Chen and John Sim (Head of BlackBerry Global Enterprise Services). Coming together with BES 12, it will also be available on cloud deployment, Windows Phone and Microsoft Office 365. But, yes, unfortunately, we won’t be getting this love as a consumer, just yet.
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Chen said he’s being kept up at night by the loss of the SAF – the service activation fee BlackBerry gets from every BlackBerry 5 or BlackBerry 7 device brought online. Sims said this is all part of moving to a completely platform-independent services business.
“From an enterprise perspective, the positioning is very much cross-platform,” Sims said. “The relative profitability across those [platforms] is for all intents and purposes relatively the same. In the past, when BES10 was introduced, we would have mumbled that we also support iOS and Android; we don’t mumble any more,” he said.
Sims mentioned some upcoming features that might help juice up excitement around BlackBerry’s services. Desktop video chat will be coming to the enterprise version of BlackBerry Messenger, although probably not to the consumer version because “we haven’t seen the pull from the consumer market” for a desktop client.
The company’s new BES 12 server will also be available as a cloud deployment so businesses in developing countries can deploy it more quickly without dedicated hardware. The server will support Windows Phone devices. And in the future, integration with Microsoft Office 365 is coming, he said.
“I kind of look at it as our own BlackBerry iCloud,” Sims said. “We’ll start to offer more services that can be consumed as a service by enterprises.”
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Via PCWorld
