Enterprise Mobility Summit 2014: HP 'lucky' to not support BlackBerry, says tech lead

'HP never went down the BlackBerry route, even in the early days of BlackBerry when it was the de facto choice'

HP is "lucky" that it doesn't need to support BlackBerry in its enterprise mobility strategy, a technology lead at the hardware and software provider has said.

Gary Voller, EMEA strategy and technology lead for HP, revealed his firm's aversion to BlackBerry during questions after his presentation at Computing's Enterprise Mobility Summit 2014, titled "Designing, deploying and managing apps".

The presentation explained cross-device mobile collaboration between HP's 300,000 employees is supported by HP Anywhere, a platform that enables users on a variety of devices to access enterprise applications and tools.

Voller said that HP Anywhere is accessible to users on iOS, Android and Windows smartphones or tablets, as well as Mac and PC desktops and laptops.

Asked why BlackBerry users are not supported, Voller replied that HP has always been a BlackBerry-free zone.

"HP never went down the BlackBerry route, even in the early days of BlackBerry when it was the de facto choice, so I guess from that perspective we were lucky that it's not something that we have to worry about," he said.

"We talk about bring your own device, and it's not one of these devices we would support. So we are Android and iOS and Windows," Voller added.

Voller was not the first at the event to question the use-case of BlackBerry as an enterprise mobility tool. Indeed, as revealed by Computing Research at an earlier keynote, just 15 per cent of IT leaders say they would be mostly likely to choose a BlackBerry ecosystem for mobile devices for business use.

Nonetheless, BlackBerry has received praise in other quarters, with the firm still seen as providing the best security for enterprise mobility devices, according to a number of speakers at the summit.