Below is a post by Thad White, Director of BBM for Business originally posted on the Inside BlackBerry for Business blog
While recent acquisitions have indicated that the mobile messaging market is still young and is not slowing down anytime soon, we’ve made plans to stay ahead of the game by providing a steady stream of new BBM offerings that appeal to all of our valued customers. This includes BBM Video, BBM Voice and BBM Channels among others.
We’re also working on areas that aren’t being widely discussed, where market offerings are extremely limited – mobile messaging for regulated industries and the security conscious. Regulated industries have a strong need for a service that is compliant, but not overly restrictive. And in true BBM fashion, we’re pleased to announce our plans to continue making the BBM service better for everyone, especially our enterprise customers in regulated industries.
Now I’d like to introduce the eBBM Suite. This new family of products and services has features and capabilities tailored to meet the needs of our enterprise customers and still address the needs of the broad end user. BBM Enterprise (formerly known as BBM Protected) is the first solution we will offer as part of the eBBM Suite and is expected to launch this summer.
Developed specifically for the security conscious, BBM Enterprise provides a way for enterprise employees to speak safely and securely both inside and outside of the workplace. Employees can message within a company under an unprecedented level of end-to-end security. Employees can also easily message their BBM contacts outside of the organization with the privacy, control and security that is inherent in BBM. All within one instance of BBM; users don’t have to download and manage two different messaging apps to meet all their messaging needs. And IT administrators and infrastructure managers don’t have to install any new hardware or software.
While BBM has always been an amazing productivity and collaboration solution that puts control of contacts and personal information directly into people’s hands, regulated industries and security conscious organizations will now have unparalleled security features that allow IT administrators to give employees a powerful collaboration platform that understands, respects and provides the boundaries they need in place to keep business running.
Security features for BBM Enterprise include end-to-end encryption of messages. BBM Enterprise will use FIPS 140-2 approved cryptographic libraries and symmetric encryption keys for an unrivalled level of trust in BBM message encryption. BBM also uses best-in-class technology for public-private signing and encryption key pairs. BBM Enterprise will work across BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS smartphones in regulated mode with no OS upgrades required.
(As of February 2015, BlackBerry holds 70+ security certifications and approvals from governments.)
BBM Enterprise is just the first of many exciting new updates you can expect from within the eBBM Suite. Stay tuned for more on the latest products and services as they become available.