Attendees of the recent 2023 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in Toronto were treated to a bird’s eye view of BlackBerry’s past, present, and future during a keynote address by BlackBerry’s Chief Elite Customer Success Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, and Head of Sustainability, Neelam Sandhu. Sandhu, who joined the company in 2009, has been a key player in the Canada-based firm’s transition from a hardware manufacturer to an Internet of Things (IoT) and Enterprise software leader, a metamorphosis she describes as more evolutionary than revolutionary.
“BlackBerry was founded on the premise that humans have an inherent need to connect, and that connectivity, as well as being reliable, must be secure and private to be sustainable,” Sandhu says, adding that the company’s foundational vision has never wavered. She notes that BlackBerry’s first invention, a secure retail point-of-sale terminal, was actually a pioneering design that helped open up the IoT — long before the term was coined. A few innovations later came the BlackBerry smartphone that changed the way we live and work. Today, BlackBerry continues to be innovation-led, with a continued focus on connectivity, security, and privacy.
Some of these innovations are affecting the day-to-day lives and livelihoods of people in communities around the world. One such case Sandhu describes is that of BlackBerry® AtHoc®, a mass notification and communications management system widely used by public agencies, military branches, and private industries, at the local, state, national, and international levels.
When natural disasters or other critical situations occur, it is often AtHoc in the hands of officials that notifies affected stakeholders. Sandhu emphasizes that how we react, and our ability to mobilize in these situations, is paramount, and the BlackBerry technology supporting emergency services and organizations like the Red Cross highlights the company’s commitment “as a software company that is enabling a sustainable and resilient world, both today and into the future.”
Sandhu elaborated that this work goes beyond words and translates directly into action. One of those actions is BlackBerry’s carbon neutral status — achieved in 2021 and maintained today — established as a commitment to sustainability that is “broader than just climate action. A sustainable world is one that is increasingly connected, and equitably so, and that connectivity must be secure,” she says.
“And I think we can all agree that BlackBerry knows a thing or two about connectivity and security,” she quips.
Sandhu outlines the inspiration behind BlackBerry’s sustainability strategy, spurred by water insecurity and flood risks faced by over 1.5 billion of the world’s population. A key outcome of this strategy has been a first-of-its-kind flood risk and water quality monitoring solution based on BlackBerry AtHoc. AtHoc leverages innovative technologies to collect and process massive amounts of sensor data, and generates alerts based on those insights. This solution lives in the AWS cloud across five regions, and delivers very low latency messaging for mass communications by utilizing several Amazon services including EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), Lambda, and DynamoDB. Its high availability, resilience, and fault tolerance meets the mandate for technology used in mission-critical situations.
