Contact: Scott Denne
While BlackBerry continues to decline, enterprise software provided a bright spot in the struggling phone maker’s earnings announcement. Though only 7% of BlackBerry’s overall revenue, software – mostly licenses of email server and mobile management software – moved up to $67m, a 15% increase on a sequential basis. Software declined on a year-over-year basis, as did every other part of the business, but the falloff was slower when compared with other divisions.
The uptick in software suggests that BlackBerry is holding on to enterprise clients far better than individual customers. That’s born out in surveys by ChangeWave Research, a service of 451 Research, where 20% of corporate IT buyers in May reported plans to buy BlackBerry phones in the coming quarter. Though that’s down by two percentage points from a quarter earlier, the results are exponentially better than the consumer market, where only 2% of smartphone buyers plan to pick up a BlackBerry.
With its decision earlier this year to provide customers of AirWatch, Good Technology and MobileIron with free licenses of its own mobility management software, BlackBerry doesn’t look ready to concede the enterprise just yet.
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