BlackBerry treading the Partner Route to tap the cyber security and application space

BlackBerry had recently announced the addition of six new partners in India, furthering their commitment to establishing and growing their global ecosystem of enterprise software partners and developers. Richard McLeod, Vice President of Global Channels – BlackBerry speaking more on this tells VARINDIA of why he sees in a complete channel strategy for BlackBerry - 

In its recent Q2 results a couple of weeks ago, BlackBerry made a bold statement of its transformation and of its aims to become a 100% software and services company. It is also keenly focused on the cyber security market. 

“We are keenly focused on Asia Pacific and India in particular as high growth markets. As we leverage our over 30 years of experience in secure mobile application delivery, we are truly finding the market moving towards us. As companies are aggressively moving towards mobile first applications, there is a massive shift towards software as a service. We are seeing an explosion of connections to the wireless network at the rate of nearly 10 million per day. This is a massive growth that we are seeing and it is playing to our strength,” says Richard McLeod, Vice President - Global Channels – BlackBerry.

The Asia Pacific and the global market in general and India in particular represent one of the largest mobile aware marketplaces and one of the strongest growth areas for mobile applications. And so, it is a big focus area for BlackBerry. BlackBerry is equally focused on the cyber security space that is in itself a huge growth market and is expected to be a 137.85 Billion in 2017 and a USD 231.94 Billion market by 2022. In India, it is expected to be about $350 billion market by 2025. 

“BlackBerry has invested very heavily in the marketplace. We made a number of acquisitions over the last several years, to the tune of about $1.3 billion for software company acquisitions to become what analysts across the board rate as the strongest platform for mobile native cyber security applications. As we look at the Indian market, we see it as one of the top growth market. Clearly, India represents one of the largest concentrations for high tech in terms of the cyber security capabilities and so we are currently investing in India,” asserts Richard.

A pre-dominantly channel company....
BlackBerry is very much a partner centric company; though it does have a sales team that is directly working with customers and partners to drive a BlackBerry platform. In Asia Pacific, it does 90 % of the volume through partners. Its goal in the marketplace is Partner First and it only goes direct when there are absolute customer requirement in some cases, like in government requirements. 

“We see the growth scale for BlackBerry is with the partners. Especially in enterprise software space, that market is driven by the channel. The channel also provides the local deployment and support, which is completely a channel model. We are growing our channel around the world and India. We are still in early days but we look for more announcements which will be completely channel oriented,” says Richard. 

BlackBerry has specifically built a while new channel program globally and has signed six partners in India. The program is three tiers in nature that comprises of an Authorized Tier, Gold Tier and Platinum Tier. The program was launched almost a year ago in India and has almost 50 partners. “Six of them are already reaching the Gold status level. They are achieving the capabilities and are not only architecting, designing and selling the solution but likewise deploying and supporting the solution and going through very rigorous training from BlackBerry,” he says. 

The channel program has been designed to re-enable the partners to capitalize in this market place. The authorized partners are provided the basics of how to sell the portfolio and a partner moves to the gold level only when we have partners that complete BlackBerry’s advance technical selling skills capabilities, get themselves online, and practise training capability. After that BlackBerry gets to augment those capabilities with the ability for them to take advantage of its software development in its APIs for doing advance integrations with work flow applications. 

BlackBerry has a global presence with about 1800 partners covering the globe. In Asia Pacific, it has about 250 partners. “We ensure that we engage our partners in monthly meetings and reviews, where we share best practises and success stories. There is an active network of partners, in terms of facilitating deployments and encouraging to one another,” says Richard.

BlackBerry has an extensive online training capability through BlackBerry universe that its partners are authorised for. It has a series of courses relative to sales and technical solution and consultation. Then it has its classroom training around systematic integration and deployment. Likewise, there are a number of specialisation capabilities beyond its Authorised, Gold and Platinum, the work spaces specialisation which is around enterprise and content collaboration solution. 

“We have an in depth specialisation training program around that. We recently announced a specialisation program to enable the capability for our partners that want to privately host our solution. We also have a very expensive market place for our ISP solution. We have over 100 ISP solutions that are specifically designed around BlackBerry unified endpoint management platform. The solutions take advantage of BlackBerry’s secure capabilities and integrate with them and add to the portfolio for our partners in driving secure solution for our customers,” sums up Richard.