San Francisco, May 22, 2014: Has mobile company BlackBerry (BB) decided to go down a new path to ensure survival? BB has taken its first step into the world of the Internet of Things (IoT) today with a new initiative called ‘Project Ion’.
This, claimed the mobile telecom company, is a series of measures that will help businesses easily connect people, devices and machines, and derive value from these connections.
“As connectivity costs continue to fall and connected technologies become pervasive, a new market is emerging – the Internet of Things,” said John Chen, Executive Chairman and CEO, BlackBerry, in a press release. “Billions of connections, generating trillions of transactions and exabytes of data daily, will require platforms that can operate securely on a global scale. No other company is in a better position than BlackBerry to provide the technological building blocks, applications and services needed to enhance productivity, improve real-time decision making and deliver on the vision of the Internet of Things.”
Project Ion was announced at the O’Reilly Solid Conference which started yesterday, i.e. May 21, in San Francisco, USA. Though details are sketchy, it will offer the resources necessary to access massive amounts of data from multiple disparate sources and distill it into meaningful, actionable information using open source and third party analytic tools. BB believes this “deeper insight” will empower companies and organisations across a range of industries including medical care, where doctors require real time diagnosis information to improve patient care.
BB said Project Ion will focus on developing a host of Internet of Things resources, including:
- A secure public application platform that will enable a new generation of IoT applications that can access massive amounts of data from multiple sources and allow businesses to make timely, informed decisions.
- Powered by QNX technology and BlackBerry secure enterprise mobility management, this platform will securely manage data from millions of end points across multi-device, multi-platform environments
- Facilitation of an IoT ecosystem consisting of partners, carriers and application developers looking to connect an ever-growing number of Internet-enabled devices on a secure public applications platform
- Strategic partnerships, including membership in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to driving standards-based technologies for industry, academia and government to accelerate the development and availability of connected technologies.
Incidentally, BB is also one of the founding members of the Application Developer Alliance (ADA), an association that focuses on advancing application development while helping to solve current challenges such as security and privacy.
The obvious question that’s being asked following this BB move is – will it lift the company out of its present crisis? For over a year or so, revenues have been showing a decline.
For the fourth quarter ending March 31, 2014, BlackBerry generated $976 million in revenue, a far cry from the $1.13 billion analysts were expecting. The revenue figure was down 18 percent sequentially, and 64 percent year over year.
Image Credit: BlackBerry
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