BlackBerry has been making a reputable name for itself in cybersecurity for decades now, so it’s all the sweeter when our efforts are recognized by peers both globally and locally. This year, the Ottawa Section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) named BlackBerry as the 2019 Outstanding High Technology Company. This non-profit, technical professional association of more than 385,000 members worldwide is a leading authority in a diverse set of technical areas, including computer engineering, telecommunications and consumer electronics among other things.
The more than 2,000 members of the IEEE Ottawa Section, along with the wider engineering, industry and academia community throughout the Ottawa region, bestowed BlackBerry with the 2019 Outstanding High Technology Company Recognition Award. The reasoning? With a significant uptake from the automotive industry’s biggest brands, BlackBerry QNX has established itself as the premiere foundational software platform for today’s cars and the connected and autonomous vehicles of the future.
“BlackBerry continues to be the gold standard for cybersecurity,” said Dr. Wahab Almuhtadi, Chair, IEEE Ottawa Section Awards & Recognition Committee (also, President, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society). “BlackBerry QNX’s broad portfolio of products and services help ensure the safety and security of vehicles and connected devices at large and make it a technology company that simply can’t be denied, both for its innovative ingenuity and real-world impact in our everyday lives.”
BlackBerry QNX offers a wide range of safety-certified and secure software products, supported by world-class engineering services. As the automotive industry continues to stretch the boundaries of technology and innovation and as vehicles become more hyperconnected than ever before, new challenges are emerging that BlackBerry QNX is uniquely designed to address.
By providing safety-certified and secure foundational software for autonomous and connected vehicles (which can contain over 100 million lines of code), BlackBerry QNX is the first line of defense for these mission-critical sub-systems, fortifying connected vehicles against their growing vulnerability to cyberattacks. In fact, QNX technology is embedded in more than 150 million vehicles on the road today. It is used by the top seven automotive Tier 1s and by 45+ OEMs, including Audi, BMW, Ford, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar Land Rover, KIA, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Toyota and Volkswagen.
As a proud Ontario-based company, we’re thrilled to be recognized by the IEEE Ottawa Section as the 2019 Outstanding High Technology Company. This recognition validates our continued and unwavering commitment to safety, cybersecurity and data privacy globally. But we’re especially proud to be honored by the IEEE Ottawa Section for not only our global cybersecurity pedigree, but our ongoing efforts in our own backyard as well. We have deep roots in the Ottawa area, which has recently become a hotbed for innovative AV technologies.
For instance, BlackBerry serves as a founding member of the Invest Ottawa-led Ottawa L5, helping to spearhead its site selection, design and launch. With their help, we founded the Canadian Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Innovator Directory to foster collaboration and partnerships among the AV industry. We also helped launch two new accelerator programs with Canada’s largest SaaS accelerator, L-SPARK, with the goal of bolstering small and mid-size technology companies to bring new products to market using BlackBerry QNX and grow their business in the process.
And to show our continued commitment to securing the future of automotive technologies, we invested $310.5 million dollars to further the advancement of safe and secure software systems for the next generation of connected and autonomous vehicles. Over the next five years, BlackBerry will hire more than 1,800 of the best and brightest engineers and scientists from Canada and around the world to spearhead this important initiative.
Once again, we’re honored to receive the 2019 Outstanding High Technology Company Recognition Award by the IEEE Ottawa Section. We hope to live up to this lofty designation by continuing to push greater levels of safety and cybersecurity both inside and outside of the vehicle for decades to come.
To learn more about BlackBerry QNX software and solutions, as well as our work securing the automotive industry, click here.