BlackBerry: 'Maybe consumer wasn't a battle we could've won'

BlackBerry says it is better equipped to win the fight in the enterprise mobility arena than consumer

BlackBerry fought a battle it probably could never have won when it tried to compete with Apple and Samsung in the consumer space, but the Canadian smartphone firm is capable of becoming the single most trusted source for enterprise mobility.

That's what Markus Mueller, senior vice president regional managing director for Europe told the audience during his keynote at the BlackBerry Experience event in central London today.

"First of all, we are recommitting to the enterprise, that's what [CEO] John Chen said when he came on board in November. What he did when he joined BlackBerry is he told us to focus, and if you want to focus, you need to focus on the battles you can win," Mueller explained, going on to admit that trying to enter the consumer space with BB10 probably was a step too far for the firm.

"If you look at the market and what we did with BlackBerry 10, how we approached the market, maybe that was a battle in the broad consumer space which we couldn't have won in the first place."

BlackBerry, Mueller told the audience, has a history of producing devices for the enterprise and that's a fight he's confident BlackBerry can win. A recurring theme in his address was the security angle.

"Enterprise is our heritage, that's what we come from, that's where security matters, that's where trust matters and that's where we see our strengths. So that's one battle we can take and we think we can win this battle," he said.

Mueller also used his keynote to describe how a key target for BlackBerry is to focus on productivity and building devices and software for specific target groups.

"Whenever you build products, it's always very good to know who you want to sell it to. The more specific the target group is, the better you can sell products to them," he said.

"So BlackBerry devices might not necessarily be a device for everybody but the target we have in mind is actually a type of person who is very busy," Mueller continued, "who has a busy personal life, leads a busy professional life - they are people who want to achieve things in life, they are very productive and we want to make devices to support that type of lifestyle.

"We want to make the best device and the best solutions which support that type of lifestyle and that type of person," he said, adding, "We want to become the single trusted provider for enterprise mobility."

The BlackBerry Experience event comes shortly after exclusive Computing Research - compiled ahead of Computing's upcoming Enterprise Mobility Summit - revealed that if CIOs were asked which mobile operating they'd choose not to use for enterprise, over half would opt against deploying BlackBerry.