By licensing BES10 APIs, BlackBerry retreats to move forward

For months, BlackBerry has been touting its highly secure BES10 (BlackBerry Enterprise Services) management server as the reason to stick with BlackBerry devices, whose sales have plummeted to a neglible percentage of the market in the last two years. Yet today, BlackBerry announced that it was licensing BES 10 APIs to competitors like EMC VMware's AirWatch subsidiary, Citrix Systems' Zenprise-based XenMobile unit, and IBM's Fiberlink unit.

So if BlackBerry 10 management can be done by the MDM tools commonly used today to manage iOS and Android devices, why bother with BES at all? At first glance, it seems as if BlackBerry is throwing in the towel on the crown jewel of its curent strategy: offering the best security for high-compliance customers.

What's actually happening is that BlackBerry is trying to do two things at once. One is to expand the sales of its BlackBerry 10 devices, whose sales are less than 4 million a year (its older, less capable BlackBerry 7 devices outsell BlackBerry 10 devices about three to one). The other is to provide a high-security server for the lucrative niche of companies that want it. It's a risky move, precisely because it raises the question of why any company would want BES10 -- or its upcoming successor, BES12 -- if they can manage BlackBerrys from the MDM tools they already have for iOS and Android.