RIM Australian MD Matthew Ball on how BB10 will change RIM's fate
RIM on the comeback trail
So who exactly is the new lineup of BlackBerry devices aimed at? While optimism is important, a solid strategy about exactly what audience you are planning to target with a brand new operating system is far more crucial to success. For Ball, that audience is becoming indistinct.
"We believe that the distinction between business users and consumers is no longer a distinction," he said.
With the consumerisation of technology, and the growth of the "Bring Your Own Device" movement into corporate organisations, Ball believes that RIMs enterprise expertise and consumer-friendly BB10 OS will make it the ideal smartphone for professional consumers.
Part of the operating system, dubbed BlackBerry Balance, is specifically designed to separate work and personal spaces right down to the encryption level, while offering a seamless front end for the user.
In many ways though, this dual-functionality of the new platform adds to marketing workload, with RIM needing to target not just consumers, but also the companies that employ them. It's a situation Ball is well aware of.
"In terms of who we are focussing our sales and marketing efforts towards telling about the proposition, it's towards a variety of end users, so both consumer and the business base. So that requires us to have, not necessarily a dual message, but in terms of talking about what is the value proposition," he explained.
"So for a consumer it's going to have everything that you want, and even things that you might not know exists now, that you can also take into a business environment."
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RIM's legacy as an enterprise-grade provider of smartphone infrastructure also puts it in a good position, according to Ball.
"Now we've got 90 per cent of the Fortune 500 customers globally, so the infrastructure to have Blackberry within our existing customer base remains strong," he said.
"Our desired end point is that we're having customers saying 'we'd like to bring in this device', and that we've already got base infrastructure with those customers so that it's super simple to bring [new BB10 devices] into that environment."
But even with its longstanding relationship with the Fortune 500 and other enterprise customers, RIM still has a lot of work to do. It's going to take a lot more than just advertising a phone, especially given the operating system is such a shift from other touchscreen devices out there.
Fortunately, RIM is planning on spending up big to make the platform work.
"Our marketing investment behind this is significant. Massive. So yeah, we have a job to do - not just a brand of BlackBerry, BB10, but what is that, how does it work and why should you want one," Ball explained.
"The feedback we had from carriers and customer meetings that we had with literally the most senior levels of people at those organisations, is that this is 'beyond expectations'. One of the execs said, 'This far exceeds what I thought I was going to see today'. And these aren't people who say that easily. They know what they're talking about."