The document provides an analytical profile of the telecommunications company Blackberry Limited. It discusses Blackberry's strengths such as its security and reliability advantage and patents. It also examines weaknesses like its lack of app selection compared to competitors. Opportunities discussed include investing more in QNX for the automotive connectivity field and re-entering the tablet market. Threats include loss of market share to Apple and Android as well as competition from third-party companies in the BYOD trend. The recommendations are to focus on delivering security for enterprises through BES and expanding the QNX embedded systems business in automotive connectivity.
Introduction to the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (...Michael Day
Slides from a lecture given at the University of Liverpool on the course: Archives and Records Management: HIST 564 Applied Communication and IT Skills, Liverpool, UK, 3 December 2007
Access and Ownership Issues of Electronic Resources in the LibraryFe Angela Verzosa
Presented by Fe Angela M. Verzosa at the Conference sponsored by the Central Luzon Librarians Association, held at Holy Angel University, Angeles City, Philippines on 7 December 2009
Introduction to the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (...Michael Day
Slides from a lecture given at the University of Liverpool on the course: Archives and Records Management: HIST 564 Applied Communication and IT Skills, Liverpool, UK, 3 December 2007
Access and Ownership Issues of Electronic Resources in the LibraryFe Angela Verzosa
Presented by Fe Angela M. Verzosa at the Conference sponsored by the Central Luzon Librarians Association, held at Holy Angel University, Angeles City, Philippines on 7 December 2009
Enterprise Data Governance and Compliance at Scale with Sri Eshasubbiah and S...Databricks
Twilio is a cloud communication platform supporting 40,000+customers, 1+ Million Developers, handling millions of messages per minute across the globe from various different sectors. There are many regulated industries and parts of the world where data needs to be moved, stored and accessed securely. Twilio provides firm foundation for that and is focused towards providing customers a secure and scalable telecommunication cloud platform.
Handling this massive amount of data in secured way is possible because of Kafka and Spark. Twilio’s Data platform team is building a compliance layer on top of Data Pipeline, Data Lake and Bulk Data Transformer to handle different compliance requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI etc. Secured Data Pipeline is a streaming channel for Data Lake, BI Data Warehouse and Elastic Search whereas Bulk Data Transformer is a ETL channel to transfer and transform bulk data from RDMS. Kafka Connect, Spark SQL and Data frames powers streaming channel and makes data wrangling and de-duping efficient.
The Data Compliance layer has various components such as Data Anonymization, Authentication, Authorization, Auditing, Custom Retention and Data Deletion to handle the requirements of Processor and Controller. Anonymization as a service provides redaction, encryption and data obfuscation and is based on the varying needs of compliance and customers. Role based Access Control is applied on Kafka layers and S3 Layers to make sure only valid systems and users can access the critical data and rest of them will access to have only redacted data. Auditing service tracks all the access to various resources both from processor and controller perspective. Distributed Spark executor model makes the petabytes of data deletion efficient after the custom retention period. Thus scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed, secured, audited data governance pipeline is possible through Kafka, Kafka connect and Spark.
The lesson intends to help the Grade 11 Senior High School Students to better understand the topic Evaluative Statements in the Reading and Writing Skills subject.
Access to Information can be defined as the right to seek, receive and impart information held by public bodies. It is an integral part of the fundamental right of freedom of expression, as recognized by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(link is external) (1948), which states that:
The fundamental right of freedom of expression encompasses the freedom to “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.
Access to information is necessary not only for the development of an individual but for the social, cultural, economic and technical development of the country.
Reference: https://en.unesco.org/themes/access-information
2. The Locutionary, Illocutionary and Perlocutionary ActsThe loc.docxeugeniadean34240
2. The Locutionary, Illocutionary and Perlocutionary Acts
The locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts are, in fact, three basic components with the help of which a speech act is formed. Leech (Leech, 1983: 199) briefly defines them like this:
locutionary act: performing an act of saying something
illocutionary act: performing an act in saying something
perlocutionary act: performing an act by saying something
The locutionary act can be viewed as a mere uttering of some words in certain language, while the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts convey a more complicated message for the hearer. An illocutionary act communicates the speaker’s intentions behind the locution and a perlocutionary act reveals the effect the speaker wants to exercise over the hearer.
This can be demonstrated on a simple example:
4. Would you close the door, please?
The surface form, and also the locutionary act, of this utterance is a question with a clear content (Close the door.) The illocutionary act conveys a request from the part of the speaker and the perlocutionary act expresses the speaker’s desire that the hearer should go and close the door.
But the individual elements cannot be always separated that easily. Bach and Harnish say that they are intimately related in a large measure (Bach and Harnish, 1979: 3). However, for better understanding of their function within a speech act, I am going to treat them individually first.
2.1. Locutionary Acts
This component of the speech act is probably the least ambiguous. Bach and Harnish (Bach and Harnish 1979: 19), commenting on Austin’s work, point out that Austin distinguishes three aspects of the locutionary act.
Austin claims that to say anything is:
A. always to perform the act of uttering certain noises (a phonetic act)
B. always to perform the act of uttering certain vocables or words ( a phatic act)
C. generally to perform the act of using that [sentence] or its constituents with a certain more or less definite ‘sense’ and a more or less definite ‘reference’, which together are equivalent to ‘meaning’ (rhetic act)
From this division it follows that the locutionary act comprises other three “sub-acts”: phonetic, phatic and rhetic. This distinction as well as the notion of locutionary act in general was often criticized by Austin’s followers. Searle even completely rejects Austin’s division and proposes his own instead (Searle, 1968: 405). Searle (Searle, 1968: 412) warns that Austin’s rhetic act is nothing else but a reformulated description of the illocutionary act and he therefore suggests another term, the so-called propositional act which expresses the proposition (a neutral phrase without illocutionary force). In other words, a proposition is the content of the utterance.
Wardhaugh offers this explanation. Propositional acts are those matters having to do with referring and predicating: we use language to refer to matters in the world and to make predictions about such matters .
What is the difference between the SW and OT areas of a SWOT.pdfabiwarmaa
What is the difference between the SW and OT areas of a SWOT? Why is this difference relevant
and important? Use Jamal's research to produce a SWOT of BlackBerry to assess its strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The purpose of the SWOT should be to determine
strategies for BlackBerry to use for the next three to five years.Jamal Obu had been working at
BlackBerry Limited for five years as a marketing analyst when he was asked to conduct a strategic
environmental assessment for BlackBerry by the vice president of Marketing. Although BlackBerry
once enjoyed the bulk of the mobile phone market, by 2015 BlackBerry was struggling. The
competitive advantage that BlackBerry enjoyed was due in large part to their small phone with little
buttons that looked like blackberries. However, Apple and Samsung developed cell phones with
touchscreens and digital keyboards that made the BlackBerry cell phones appear ancient. Jamal's
boss wanted a strategic environmental assessment in order to guide the company in their strategic
planning. BlackBerry was caught completely off-guard by the rise of Apple's iPhone and they
needed to devise a strategic plan to recapture market share. Jamal and his fellow workers were
going to need to develop a vision for the future of the company if they expected to compete. Jamal
decided to use a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) as a framework to
evaluate BlackBerry's situation because he knew that format would allow him to organize the
quantitative and qualitative data necessary to help him understand the external and internal
factors at play.Jamal had leamed about SWOTs in his MBA and knew the assessment tool was
created by Albert Humphrey, who led a research project at Stanford University in the 1960 s and
1970 s using data from many top companies. Humphrey's goal was to identify why corporate
planning failed. He identified areas of strategic importance that he called SOFT: What is good in
the present is Satisfactory, good in the future is an Opportunity; bad in the present is a Fault, and
bad in the future is a Threat" (Humphrey, 2005). " F " was subsequently changed to "W" to better
reflect the weaknesses that existed within the company. The elements of the first SWOT were
published in 1965 in Business Policy, Text and Cases by Learned, Christensen, Andrews and
Guth (Morrison, 2016). That text became the most popular textbook in the academic study of
strategic management, and Jamal knew from completing strategic cases from that book that a
properly conducted SWOT could lead to finding new opportunities (such as entering a new
industry) that matched the strengths of their organization. He knew that SWOTs were valuable
tools that could be used to stay abreast of changing industry factors. As such, Jamal knew that
such an assessment could help inform BlackBerry's strategic planning, but he was unsure what
direction his SWOT might lead the company in their current dire situation. Identifying .
This is our UofC Business Class (Synergy) business audit of BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion) to determine its viability for potential investors and employees. We want to find out whether BlackBerry presents a good opportunity or not.
A comprehensive investigation into the government’s impact, social trends, ethics, social responsibility, technology, marketing, stakeholders, and financial position was done.
At the end, an overall conclusions and recommendations were provided.
Rufran
Enterprise Data Governance and Compliance at Scale with Sri Eshasubbiah and S...Databricks
Twilio is a cloud communication platform supporting 40,000+customers, 1+ Million Developers, handling millions of messages per minute across the globe from various different sectors. There are many regulated industries and parts of the world where data needs to be moved, stored and accessed securely. Twilio provides firm foundation for that and is focused towards providing customers a secure and scalable telecommunication cloud platform.
Handling this massive amount of data in secured way is possible because of Kafka and Spark. Twilio’s Data platform team is building a compliance layer on top of Data Pipeline, Data Lake and Bulk Data Transformer to handle different compliance requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI etc. Secured Data Pipeline is a streaming channel for Data Lake, BI Data Warehouse and Elastic Search whereas Bulk Data Transformer is a ETL channel to transfer and transform bulk data from RDMS. Kafka Connect, Spark SQL and Data frames powers streaming channel and makes data wrangling and de-duping efficient.
The Data Compliance layer has various components such as Data Anonymization, Authentication, Authorization, Auditing, Custom Retention and Data Deletion to handle the requirements of Processor and Controller. Anonymization as a service provides redaction, encryption and data obfuscation and is based on the varying needs of compliance and customers. Role based Access Control is applied on Kafka layers and S3 Layers to make sure only valid systems and users can access the critical data and rest of them will access to have only redacted data. Auditing service tracks all the access to various resources both from processor and controller perspective. Distributed Spark executor model makes the petabytes of data deletion efficient after the custom retention period. Thus scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed, secured, audited data governance pipeline is possible through Kafka, Kafka connect and Spark.
The lesson intends to help the Grade 11 Senior High School Students to better understand the topic Evaluative Statements in the Reading and Writing Skills subject.
Access to Information can be defined as the right to seek, receive and impart information held by public bodies. It is an integral part of the fundamental right of freedom of expression, as recognized by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(link is external) (1948), which states that:
The fundamental right of freedom of expression encompasses the freedom to “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.
Access to information is necessary not only for the development of an individual but for the social, cultural, economic and technical development of the country.
Reference: https://en.unesco.org/themes/access-information
2. The Locutionary, Illocutionary and Perlocutionary ActsThe loc.docxeugeniadean34240
2. The Locutionary, Illocutionary and Perlocutionary Acts
The locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts are, in fact, three basic components with the help of which a speech act is formed. Leech (Leech, 1983: 199) briefly defines them like this:
locutionary act: performing an act of saying something
illocutionary act: performing an act in saying something
perlocutionary act: performing an act by saying something
The locutionary act can be viewed as a mere uttering of some words in certain language, while the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts convey a more complicated message for the hearer. An illocutionary act communicates the speaker’s intentions behind the locution and a perlocutionary act reveals the effect the speaker wants to exercise over the hearer.
This can be demonstrated on a simple example:
4. Would you close the door, please?
The surface form, and also the locutionary act, of this utterance is a question with a clear content (Close the door.) The illocutionary act conveys a request from the part of the speaker and the perlocutionary act expresses the speaker’s desire that the hearer should go and close the door.
But the individual elements cannot be always separated that easily. Bach and Harnish say that they are intimately related in a large measure (Bach and Harnish, 1979: 3). However, for better understanding of their function within a speech act, I am going to treat them individually first.
2.1. Locutionary Acts
This component of the speech act is probably the least ambiguous. Bach and Harnish (Bach and Harnish 1979: 19), commenting on Austin’s work, point out that Austin distinguishes three aspects of the locutionary act.
Austin claims that to say anything is:
A. always to perform the act of uttering certain noises (a phonetic act)
B. always to perform the act of uttering certain vocables or words ( a phatic act)
C. generally to perform the act of using that [sentence] or its constituents with a certain more or less definite ‘sense’ and a more or less definite ‘reference’, which together are equivalent to ‘meaning’ (rhetic act)
From this division it follows that the locutionary act comprises other three “sub-acts”: phonetic, phatic and rhetic. This distinction as well as the notion of locutionary act in general was often criticized by Austin’s followers. Searle even completely rejects Austin’s division and proposes his own instead (Searle, 1968: 405). Searle (Searle, 1968: 412) warns that Austin’s rhetic act is nothing else but a reformulated description of the illocutionary act and he therefore suggests another term, the so-called propositional act which expresses the proposition (a neutral phrase without illocutionary force). In other words, a proposition is the content of the utterance.
Wardhaugh offers this explanation. Propositional acts are those matters having to do with referring and predicating: we use language to refer to matters in the world and to make predictions about such matters .
What is the difference between the SW and OT areas of a SWOT.pdfabiwarmaa
What is the difference between the SW and OT areas of a SWOT? Why is this difference relevant
and important? Use Jamal's research to produce a SWOT of BlackBerry to assess its strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The purpose of the SWOT should be to determine
strategies for BlackBerry to use for the next three to five years.Jamal Obu had been working at
BlackBerry Limited for five years as a marketing analyst when he was asked to conduct a strategic
environmental assessment for BlackBerry by the vice president of Marketing. Although BlackBerry
once enjoyed the bulk of the mobile phone market, by 2015 BlackBerry was struggling. The
competitive advantage that BlackBerry enjoyed was due in large part to their small phone with little
buttons that looked like blackberries. However, Apple and Samsung developed cell phones with
touchscreens and digital keyboards that made the BlackBerry cell phones appear ancient. Jamal's
boss wanted a strategic environmental assessment in order to guide the company in their strategic
planning. BlackBerry was caught completely off-guard by the rise of Apple's iPhone and they
needed to devise a strategic plan to recapture market share. Jamal and his fellow workers were
going to need to develop a vision for the future of the company if they expected to compete. Jamal
decided to use a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) as a framework to
evaluate BlackBerry's situation because he knew that format would allow him to organize the
quantitative and qualitative data necessary to help him understand the external and internal
factors at play.Jamal had leamed about SWOTs in his MBA and knew the assessment tool was
created by Albert Humphrey, who led a research project at Stanford University in the 1960 s and
1970 s using data from many top companies. Humphrey's goal was to identify why corporate
planning failed. He identified areas of strategic importance that he called SOFT: What is good in
the present is Satisfactory, good in the future is an Opportunity; bad in the present is a Fault, and
bad in the future is a Threat" (Humphrey, 2005). " F " was subsequently changed to "W" to better
reflect the weaknesses that existed within the company. The elements of the first SWOT were
published in 1965 in Business Policy, Text and Cases by Learned, Christensen, Andrews and
Guth (Morrison, 2016). That text became the most popular textbook in the academic study of
strategic management, and Jamal knew from completing strategic cases from that book that a
properly conducted SWOT could lead to finding new opportunities (such as entering a new
industry) that matched the strengths of their organization. He knew that SWOTs were valuable
tools that could be used to stay abreast of changing industry factors. As such, Jamal knew that
such an assessment could help inform BlackBerry's strategic planning, but he was unsure what
direction his SWOT might lead the company in their current dire situation. Identifying .
This is our UofC Business Class (Synergy) business audit of BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion) to determine its viability for potential investors and employees. We want to find out whether BlackBerry presents a good opportunity or not.
A comprehensive investigation into the government’s impact, social trends, ethics, social responsibility, technology, marketing, stakeholders, and financial position was done.
At the end, an overall conclusions and recommendations were provided.
Rufran
What should Jamal propose as a strategy for BlackBerry as a .pdfabiwarmaa
What should Jamal propose as a strategy for BlackBerry as a result of the SWOT assessment?
Assess Jamal's research. What additional information would you have included in your research to
augment your SWOT?development, and customer service to develop a single unified SWOT for
the entire company. Jamal called upon various departments to offer SWOT analyses because he
wanted to collaborate in order to pull together more detailed information. He reminded each
department to be honest in their assessment of their part of the company. Each department
offered information about their inner workings. The marketing department brought Jamal a SWOT
that analyzed product sales, pricing, advertising, and distribution. The finance department brought
Jamal the fiscal results from different products and areas of the company. The research and
development department reported on patents and product development. The operations
department brought statistics on how much fixed and operating capacity BlackBerry was utilizing,
and the customer service department reported on customer satisfaction levels with the company's
products and services. Strengths When Jamal analyzed the departmental SWOTs he was able to
identify several of BlackBerry's strengths. BlackBerry was once the most respected name in the
mobile communications industry, and the brand continued to be very well known. The brand
remained well liked by its supporters and still retained some popularity in its local market of
Canada. According to Barker (2011). "Throughout early decades of the twenty-first century, the
BlackBerry was synonymous with business connectivity. Its strong support for email, messaging,
global roaming, and mobile document editing made it the best in class among the other fledgling
smartphone platforms." Add in the fact that BlackBerry was a "cute" phone with the little
blackberry-shaped buttons, and BlackBerry had an easy time marketing their product. BlackBerry
had 595 million dollars in revenue in 2004, and revenues rose to a high of almost 20 billion dollars
in 2011. Unfortunately, revenue decreased to 2.1 billion dollars by 2016. BlackBerry's net income
also peaked in 2011 at 3.4 billion dollars. By 2016,Jamal had learned about SWOTs in his MBA
and knew the assessment tool was created by Albert Humphrey, who led a research project at
Stanford University in the 1960 s and 1970 s using data from many top companies. Humphrey's
goal was to identify why corporate planning failed. He identified areas of strategic importance that
he called SOFT: What is good in the present is Satisfactory, good in the future is an Opportunity;
bad in the present is a Fault, and bad in the future is a Threat" (Humphrey, 2005). "F" was
subsequently changed to "W" to better reflect the weaknesses that existed within the company.
The elements of the first SWOT were published in 1965 in Business Policy, Text and Cases by
Learned, Christensen, Andrews and Guth (Morrison, 2016). That text became the most popul.
Blackberry case study-As an academic subject of Strategic Management having q...Kartik Mehta
CASE STUDY
Keyboard lovers bemoan their own as BlackBerry in trouble
BlackBerry could soon be leaving the phone business, which is worrying its loyal users who have refused to give up its devices.After teaching the world to type on tiny buttons, BlackBerry could soon be leaving the business of
making phones - leaving fewer options for a vocal minority still committed to phones with its once
popular physical keyboard.
BlackBerry Is Back: Strategy and Product Updates Point the Way ForwardBlackBerry
451 Research report evaluates BlackBerry's turnaround from a device manufacturer into an enterprise software and security business under John Chen's leadership.
451 Research's conclusions include:
-- "Under CEO John Chen, BlackBerry has significantly improved its financial position and product focus."
-- "Almost every product in BlackBerry's bag of tricks directly or by extension is addressing the challenges of managing a diverse set of IoT devices."
-- "BlackBerry is very competitive in security, has a formidable leadership team, improving financials and some strong assets thoughtfully acquired, which in turn opens up new white space for it to attack."
-- "QNX is perhaps BlackBerry's most exciting IoT play because of its deployed footprint in embedded-computing markets and automotive. BlackBerry's strategy in connected cars is to aggressively expand beyond its deployed footprint in in-vehicle infotainment into adjacent areas like telematics, advanced driver assistance systems,
gateways and cockpit domain controllers."
A Case Study on Research In Motion (now BlackBerry).
The case study is published by Amity Business School. Any kind of copyright infringement or plagiarism is strictly prohibited. Please respect the author and the extensive research that has been involved.
The analysis is purely for academic purposes only.
1. Analytical Profile of Blackberry Limited 1
DATE: April 13, 2015
TO: Professor Sentz
FROM: YoonHwan Cho, David Johnson, Maxwell Galbraith
SUBJECT: Analytical Profile of Telecommunication Company BlackBerry Limited
Scope
Our group will present the telecommunication company BlackBerry Limited. In this report we
will provide the information so that the readers have a better understanding of the
company. Topics covered in this SWOT analysis are: Blackberry’s security and reliability
advantage, the investment and development of QNX, the opportunity to enter the tablet market
and increase user appeal, the potential for a large market share for the automotive platform via
QNX, and the threat of competition and how it should be dealt with. At the end of the report, we
will provide the plans of how BlackBerry Limited can continue to stay competitive while going
up against the smartphone giants: Apple and Google.
Objectives
Most people have heard about the telecommunication company Blackberry Limited. The purpose
of this report is to give a detailed analysis of Blackberry from an investor’s point of view and to
present it in a strength, weakness,opportunity, and threat format. Yes, Blackberry makes cell
phones for personal and corporate use, but they do much more than that. We are here to provide a
glimpse into what Blackberry offers in forms of market share,and what can be done to improve
on that at the same time as mitigating as much risk as possible. In today’s world, competition is
fierce in the smartphone market, and companies that do not have a large presence may not appeal
to investors. This report will not only communicate what markets and niches Blackberry is
dominant in, but it will also identify where Blackberry can grow in, which might signal a sign as
a potential lucrative future investment. Going forward, this report’s ultimate objective is to
provide a thorough analysis of Blackberry’s current position, where it should concentrate its
resources in, and thoughtful recommendations that serve as a guideline for investors.
Methodology
Company Background
Research in Motion (RIM) is a Canadian telecommunication company founded by engineering
students, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin in 1984. In January of 2013, the company changed
its name to BlackBerry Limited. The company’s main headquarters are located in Canada,with
subsidiary locations in United States and Europe. The first BlackBerry, a Pager,was introduced
in 1998 and patented the keyboard design, which was easy to type with user’s thumbs. As newer
devices were introduced to the market, it quickly gained popularity due to its features:messaging
could send fax, read receipts, and send/receive emails (Moon, 2013).
Secondary Research (sources)
Blackberry Limited is one of those companies that is well known throughout North America by
their products, yet still remains relatively unknown as far as management and where the company
is heading in the future. As a group, we had to dive deep into the internet to discover the
information we needed. Yes,there is a lot of information about Blackberry products and sales
figures, but as mentioned before, the strategies behind management and philosophies of
Blackberry’s executives required more in-depth analysis. We found a large amount of useful
information on accredited business newspaper websites such as forbes.com and
theglobeandmail.com. In addition the scholarly journal titled MarketLine Case Study:Blackberry
2. Analytical Profile of Blackberry Limited 2
Limited provided a huge wealth of information in a clear,decisive manner. This journal discussed
the potential of Blackberry’s future in the consumer market. Published in April 2014, it was one
of our most up-to-date credible sources.
Not much numerical data was provided straight from Blackberry’s website. In fact,almost no
useful information pertaining to our analysis was found on Blackberry’s public website. As a
result, our group had to reply on mostly credited internet sites and journals to come to a decision.
We strived to use the most up-to-date information as possible, and as with all internet sources, we
carefully filtered our result to weed out any bias or options of the authors. Due to our filtered
internet research and use of the MarketLine Case Study, we were able to implement clear data
into our analysis and come to the results that we present below.
Findings
Strengths:
Security is one of the most appealing features of BlackBerry. A lot of businesses are
communicating by emails and messages. Sensitive information are sent and received between
businesses and if even one information was to be leaked, it would cause a problem for the
business. BlackBerry’s secure network provides the assurance that the content of one’s device is
safe from an unwanted breach. According to a study by security firm Trend Micro, Bloor
Research and Altimeter Group, BlackBerry scored the highest when compared with smartphone
giants, Apple IOS and Android. Comparison of the following was considered to find the best
secured Operating System: built-in security, application security, authentication, device wipe,
device firewalls, and virtualization (Ashford, 2012).
With increasing number of businesses implementing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD),
BlackBerry may be the most sought out device for businesses. Professional users will be able to
benefit from using BlackBerry because it provides reliable features such as: higher security, better
email service, calendar management, messaging, battery life and most of all BlackBerry
Enterprise Service (BES). BES is designed to facilitate productivity by securely connecting
employees to data,applications and people. With over 70 Security Certifications and average of
35 petabytes of data transfer per month, it is the way to do mobile business (The BlackBerry,
2015). Additionally, BlackBerry is the owner of over 44,000 patents of basic functioning of a
mobile devices, security, and consumer-friendly features. Most of BBRY’s patents are in security
rather than wireless; however,these patents are worth more than $1.43 billion in NB values.
BlackBerry limited acquires hundreds of patents every year in order to make improvements to its
mobile devices (Decker,2015).
The acquisition of QNX Systems in year 2010 is an added asset to the BlackBerry Limited. QNX
is designed for embedded devices and an extremely stable and secure microkernel based
operating system that Blackberry uses to empower its smartphones and tablets (Team,
2014). Competitors such as MacOS and Windows use an operating system that uses monolithic
system, but with a microkernel architecture, it is better equipped for multi-tasking and is less
likely to crash the device because it is more stable, secure,flexible, and easier to maintain since it
uses separate servers/circuits unlike monolithic where applications and processes all share the
same memory (Umiastowski, 2013)
Weaknesses:
One of the weaknesses that BlackBerry has is the inability to compete with the
competitors. BlackBerry has fewer application selection compared to Apple and Android and
3. Analytical Profile of Blackberry Limited 3
with the perception of BlackBerry being for the “professionals,” BlackBerry lacks in unique
designs to attract the younger generations. According to a research,the number of applications
for each Operating Systems are followed: Android 1.35 million, iOS 1.3 million, Windows 0.3
million and BlackBerry 0.15 million. Also, there is an issue of availability of
applications. BlackBerry’s versions of applications are usually unavailable while the same
applications of other Operating Systems are already released (Klais, 2013). Not being able to
bring application and design in the same level as the competitors will result in lower appeal to the
consumers.
BlackBerry was the most popular smartphones and they were mostly sold to companies to be
used in businesses. The brand was known in the market, but with the introduction of iPhones and
Samsung devices, the demand for BlackBerry dropped. Majority of BlackBerry users were
corporate employees and companies were providing this device for them to use for work;
however, the phone had limited use because the freedom to run application will have cause a
higher risk to its security. Therefore,the I.T. managers wanted to issue a more secure to the
employees, but consumers wanted phones that are attractive,fun and free to use, and wanted a
device that is directly available to them (Manjoo, 2013).
Finally, BlackBerry failed to market and promote the brand to the consumers. In business
marketing is the key. Changing the company name to BlackBerry was a start because consumers
didn’t have any idea that RIM made BlackBerry, but failing to constantly promoting its new
available products, caused a continuous decline in market share and sale. The two juggernauts in
smartphones Samsung and Apple spent over $400 million and $333.4 million, respectively, on
marketing in U.S. alone, while BlackBerry spent slightly over $40 million, only 10% of what
Samsung spent. Without strengthening the brand, company will always fall behind its
competitors (Cheng, 2013). Not being able to market the brand and making designs that are
appealing to consumers had an impact on the company’s net income, the company suffered net
loss of $6.8 billion in three consecutive years, from year 2013 to 2015 (BBRY,2015).
Opportunities:
In recent years,Blackberry Limited was struggling financially. More specifically, they were
experiencing huge overall operating expenses,upwards of $7 billion. Like any company that is
under financial pressure,one opportunity is to revise their cost accounting department in pursuit
of cutting unnecessary costs. Under the leadership of CEO John Chen, Blackberry has
significantly reduced its overall operating costs. From total operating expenses of $7.12 billion in
FY 2014, total operating expenses for FY 2015 were $2.02 billion, a massive decrease (Pellegrini,
2015). A main source of this cost cutting comes from Chen’s decision to outsource device
manufacturing to an outside company, Foxconn. Moving forward, another opportunity for
Blackberry resides in reducing its cost of revenue, which in turn increases gross profit (Silcoff,
2014). Chen and other executives could hire out a worthy specialized accounting firm to conduct
cost-profit analysis and dive deeper into their cost cutting strategy.
Second, QNXis regarded as Blackberry Limited’s most potential technology asset. The
opportunity that Blackberry has here is that they need to invest more into further developing this
technology for the automotive connectivity field. Simply put, QNXruns your car’s infotainment
system. Blackberry already has contracts with over 40 automakers, mostly in North America and
Europe. This investment of capital will work towards expanding QNX to be applicable to
automakers in China and India, specifically automakers like Hong Qi and Tata Motors.
Furthermore, Blackberry and QNX currently have the ability to partner with Apple to provide the
operating system for Apple’s CarPlay. With contracts ranging from Ford to Ferrari, this
opportunity could provide huge revenue for Blackberry (Dignan, 2014). Currently, QNX retains a
4. Analytical Profile of Blackberry Limited 4
53% market share,with its second place rival Microsoft’s market share of only 27%, there is no
doubt that we could see market share percentages as high as 65 to 70 percent within the next five
years (Team,2014).
Lastly, Blackberry Limited has an opportunity to re-enter the tablet market. Aiding this process
will be the QNXoperating system and a revamped cloud based structure. It’s time for Blackberry
to begin offering ultra-secure tablets to their corporate clients, like the U.S. government and
enterprise users,for discounted rates. Blackberry acquired Secusmart, a super-secure mobile
operating system based on QNXlast year. Using this technology, the tablet will be able to
separate work applications from personal apps, keeping the data from the two sides apart and
minimizing potential security risks (electronista.com, 2015). This will be Blackberry comparative
advantage in the tablet market and potential increase its dwindling current market share.
Threats:
Before the popularity of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android really took hold of the
smartphone world, circa 2008-2010, Blackberry Limited was a force to be reckoned with, one
with competative market share and innovation. In 2009, some 40% of U.S. smartphones wore the
BlackBerry badge, according to Silicon Angel, an independent media company based in Silicon
Valley, CA (Wheatley, 2015). However,things have gone downhill for Blackberry once those
competitors took over the market. The continued loss of market share is a direct threat for
Blackberry. Its market share of only 0.7% in 2013 is slightly worse than Microsoft’s Windows
Phone, at 3.3%, but both are dwarfed by the giants of the industry, Apple and Android, at 12.3%
and 83.6%, respectively (Page,2014). Without a substantial share of the market, it is hard for
Blackberry to launch products and develop a new type of customer base, something more
expanded than just government agencies and loyal customers. Due to this, Blackberry also lacks
the ability to regain customers that have moved on to other brands. Apple and Android have no
signs at all of slowing down, so Blackberry really needs to come up with an innovative way to
regain a portion of the market share and customer basis they once had, even if that means just
setting targets at just 0.3 - 0.5% market growth per year. With attainable goals like these,
Blackberry will dismiss the threat of being labeled as,“the walking-dead smartphone company”
(Wheatley, 2015).
Although Blackberry Limited can consider the emerging trend of “Bring Your Own Device”,
BYOD,a strength due to its small, yet loyal customer basis and its BES10 (Blackberry Enterprise
Server) platform, the BYOD trend can also be a substantial threat. This is due to the emergence of
third party companies that do exactly what BES cannot, securely manage multiple devices
(Jurevicius, 2013). Companies like Airwatch, LLC.,now give corporations the ability to let
employees use their personal devices, usually iPhones or Android phones, for their business
needs as well. Prior to the BYOD trend, Blackberry was the only carrier for enterprises that
provided the security and reliability needed. Now, these third party companies make the strengths
that were once unique to Blackberrys available to whatever phone the employee wants to use.
According to Airwatch’s chairman, Alan Dabbiere, “Enterprises could provide separate corporate
and personal email on devices, allow for remote access into corporate networks, and have IT
departments set pass codes and link to corporate applications via the devices” (Silcoff, Marlow,
Kiladze, 2013). With the need to not depend solely on Blackberry devices, the BYOD trend poses
a huge threat to the defining qualities that made Blackberry the enterprise giant it once was.
Recommendations
In the history of the technology industry, it is hard to recall a company that took a harder hit than
Blackberry Limited did. In 2013, Blackberry hit rock bottom, but CEO John Chen has worked
5. Analytical Profile of Blackberry Limited 5
hard to turn around the company, and now in 2015, Blackberry has nowhere to go but up. This
company has a unique set of opportunities ahead of it that differentiates itself from other
smartphone manufacturers. Furthermore, if Blackberry capitalizes on these opportunities, they
will provide Blackberry with a stable ground to work off of to eventually re-enter the smartphone
market and compete with Apple and Google.
Our finding leads us to conclude that Blackberry does not need to focus entirely on the
smartphone market currently. Instead, their strengths lie in areas of technology and security that
their main competitors cannot rival. Maximizing these opportunities will put Blackberry ahead of
its competitors and reach clients that other giants in the industry simply cannot. As a guideline to
execution in 2015-2016, Blackberry must follow the three-phase plan as follows:
1. Deliver Security for Enterprises. First,Blackberry must expand and deliver its enterprise
security segment, as their expertise in this area are unmatched. With BES 10 and BES 12,
Blackberry is poised to take advantage of the more than 600 million smartphones that are
used by businesses around the world, the vast majority of these are not connected to any
formal mobility management solution. There is a massive basis of smartphones in the
business world, Blackberry must capitalize on this by selling its BES 10 and BES 12
services to companies who need help managing their phone fleet of smartphones and
tablets (Wheatley, 2015). Targeting smaller startups, internet based companies, and
information holding companies with aggressive negotiations and compelling contracts
will reinforce Blackberry as being the premier company in enterprise and mobility
security management, giving the company the assets and customer basis it needs to
launch its other segments.
2. Expand QNX. Second,Blackberry must develop and invest in their QNX embedded
systems business, which will provide unparalleled access to the automobile industry that
Apple and Google cannot rival. As stated by CEO John Chen, “[QNX is] Already the
dominant machine-to-machine technology of the automotive industry, new capabilities
and cloud services are being unveiled, and we're looking toward adjacent verticals for
expansion” (cnbc.com, 2014). By expanding QNX, Blackberry needs to focus on taking
on more international automakers to utilize their QNX system to provide automotive
connectivity. Markets such as China, Indonesia, and India provide an opportunity for
QNXto establish itself as the premier, cost effective, machine-to-machine connectivity
medium for automotive operating systems. By investing more capital into making QNX
more cost efficient for automakers in less-developed economies, Blackberry will be able
capitalize on the automotive connectivity trend on a bigger scale that just solely relying
on U.S. based automakers.
3. Promote International Markets. Finally, Blackberry needs to look to different
international markets to promote their cheaper and more efficient smartphones and
services, such as the Classic, the Passport,and their messaging service BBM, to
consumers who cannot afford more advance smartphones and whose countries cannot
support that type of infrastructure and bandwidth. Again, markets like Indonesia, India,
and even China have huge areas of less-developed economies. Many people in these
areas do not have access to a computer, and if there is internet service there,it is at a
much lower bandwidth than economically developed areas. In these economies,
Blackberry must market its smartphones that are much more simple to use and require
less bandwidth for a sustainable internet connection. Also in these economies,
Blackberry’s BBM messaging service is more reliable and cheaper than similar services
from other smartphone manufacturers (Ferreira,Connors, 2012). No matter what Apple
6. Analytical Profile of Blackberry Limited 6
or Google does, they will not be able to knock Blackberry off of the top of the third-
world connectivity market. By making efforts to reach more foreign international
markets, Blackberry can increase its global brand awareness. This could pay a huge part
in Blackberry’s future profits as the world becomes more connected at an exponentially
increasing rate.
Following this three part plan is a low risk, high reward strategy that will differentiate Blackberry
from its competitors, provide working capital, and will develop a stable basis on which it can
launch its future technologies to go head to head with other smartphone manufacturers in
developed economies.
Business Impacts
The following plan should be executed to assist BlackBerry in expanding to potential new
markets before competitors have the opportunity to do so. It is probable that corporations could
find other security substitutes instead of BES. Also, automotive connectivity technology from
other companies could surpass QNXin the automotive industry.
However,the potential of failure should not create hesitation, considering the greater opportunity
for success. Blackberry’s superiority in security and encryption is unparalleled, greatly
minimizing the threat of sensitive information being stolen, making it a worthy investment. QNX
is currently the leading automotive connectivity technology in the industry, with the possibility of
greater expansion in foreign automotive markets of countries with enormous populations. Also,
Blackberry could face stiff competition from other mobile devices in foreign markets where other
mobile phones could already dominate the market. Yet,Blackberry’s potential for new customers
is high in global markets where a quality device that provides low-cost services are favorable,
compared with pricey Android, Apple, and Samsung devices that are not feasible for
many. Blackberry has many positive prospects for its future if managed correctly, but the
company needs to invest in these prospective new opportunities swiftly and cautiously before the
competition can.
Conclusion
Within the research and findings presented in this report, Blackberry shows stability with the
possibility for greater advancement. Blackberry stands superior in its security and automotive
communication technologies, with great potential of expansion in domestic and foreign markets.
From the recommendations presented by our group, Blackberry will stand in a strong position for
investor appeal, with increased revenues and greater marketability, returning to the market force
it once was and becoming a company that will flourish for many years to come.
7. Analytical Profile of Blackberry Limited 7
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