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The Canadian maker BlackBerry after failing in the consumer segment in India has made a shift in strategy, in line with what BlackBerry is doing globally. Its strategy now revolves around increased focus on the enterprise segment. India, with its large population of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), does offer a significant upside to the enterprise business and BB with its right services and security solutions is optimizing on it. To spearhead the movement to become strong in the enterprise sector, the company has also opened two enterprise solution centers in Mumbai and Gurgaon to showcase its enterprise offerings such as BES10, BlackBerry enterprise server 5 and cloud solutions.
And now extending its services into four different verticals BlackBerry is set to shine again in the country with its distinctive approach designed for enterprises. “The enterprise strategy revolves around software and services which have different stream of revenue which is very critical for us and that has been a unique selling point because on the security side of Blackberry nobody can beat us and that’s been our key success factor across all the industry domain when it comes to enterprise and software sales and services contributes to a major part of the revenue,” shares Hitesh Shah, Director, Channel Sales, BlackBerry India.
Strategies of revival
Reviving itself from the falling shelf, BlackBerry is banking big upon Enterprise Mobility and BYOD. To improve employee productivity and bring agility across functions in the organization, BlackBerry is betting big on the trend and believes that the enterprise consumers understand the value of BB.
“On the enterprise side you won’t see much of Android because people do understand about the lubricity into it and people have got multiple sources which have confirmed that how BB is the only secured platform that is giving you the gold standard for all industry verticals. Android may be the buzz word amongst the consumers but enterprise does value BB as an operating system,” adds Shah.
To make a strong foothold in the industry BlackBerry is working through multiple channels. “There are three elements on the enterprise side- one being the hardware, the second software services and third being the carrier side. For us to get into the enterprise these three are the only channels on which we operate on,” informs Shah.
BB is selling the devices from general trade which is the mom & pop shops, LFRs, BB own exclusive stores, and online medium to cater to the device side for the enterprises. BB has Ingram as its national distributor for enterprise business who helps the company in reaching out to the VARs to cater to the enterprises for devices, software as well as solutions.
From the enterprise go to market perspective these are three points on which BB work closely to ensure that they cater to the requirement of the market. Ingram is a national distributor for enterprise business and has a host of value added resellers.
Emerging trends
Recently BB did a survey on ‘India Enterprise Mobility’ where it finds that 71% of the organizations either have the mobility policy or are currently in the process of drafting one. Enterprise mobility has been pushing across and has become the first choice of all the organizations. Everybody today is talking about the mobile applications and all other elements related to mobility from a workflow perspective.
On seeing the trend is an emerging one, the scope is massive for BB given the workforce and mobile population we have in India. However, Shah believes, “Still it is little above a nascent stage where people have started understanding importance of mobility and the criticalness of how mobile and mobility can help them achieve more efficiency in the organization. There’s a lot of scope for development in India.”
Selecting the right platform and developing an enterprise-wide mobility strategy emerged as key challenges for implementing a mobility solution. The top three investment areas for enterprise mobility include telecom expense management and packaged apps for mobile collaboration. However, Shah sees that Enterprise mobility is predominantly dominated by Banking and Finance. There is one of the major deployments happening. Law firms today have also understood the importance of mobility.
“We’ve got host of solutions, partner ecosystem that we have got across the country and these partners have developed horizontal as well as vertical applications that cater to majority of the segment that we look at,” shares Shah.
Everyday there is a new trend forming in the enterprise market and we always want to keep our enterprise channels ahead in terms of knowledge base. Our strategy for VAR’s has always been to make sure that their business is profitable and provide them a strong backbone by supporting on any of the issues that come up during enterprise sales, added Shah.
Mobility comprises of multiple elements in terms of application deployment, application management and maintaining security of application BB provides single console that helps you manage everything along with the security which otherwise would require additional deployment of infrastructure.
Today 45% of BB customers fall under the enterprise domain in India. BlackBerry’s secure enterprise service is no longer limited to its own devices. Making it compatible with other devices and platforms helped the company gain customers. At present BB is giving services to the host of companies namely Bharucha & Partners, ITC, Indiabulls, AZB&Partners, Financial Technologies India Ltd., The 3C Company, Emcure Pharmaceuticals, and Nishith Desai Associates.
India certainly is a focused market and can supplement BlackBerry’s revival on the hardware side of the business. The only impeding factor is the pricing. If Blackberry chooses to be aggressive on the pricing, its revival is very much possible.
