imei to support BES12 in new co-hosting agreement, giving businesses safe and easy access to corporate data, ability to manage employee IDs and new ways to collaborate with colleagues

Nov 17, 2014

Gartner Symposium ITxpo, Gold Coast - Australia -BlackBerry® (NASDAQ: BBRY; TSX: BB), a global leader in mobile communications, today announced at Gartner Symposium that BES12™: a cross-platform EMM solution that securely manages devices from all major enterprise mobile platforms, will be made available to customers in Australia as a hosted service with partner, imei Pty Ltd, a managed mobility service provider headquartered in Sydney.

BES12 is the foundation for BlackBerry's extensive portfolio of enterprise security, productivity, and communication and collaboration services that will help organisations securely connect employees with each other, corporate information and the machines that are required to get their jobs done. The BES12 platform seamlessly supports iOS®, Android™, Windows Phone, BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS.

BlackBerry's agreement with imei will offer a hosted BES12 (and BES10) cloud solution, on a monthly subscription, for ease of managing any major mobile platform.  The hosted solution will provide organisations with all the benefits of BlackBerry multi-platform enterprise mobility management (EMM) and advanced security capabilities, with the convenience of hosted IT administration and support.

According to research by Australian analyst firm Telsyte, around half of Australian organisations not currently using a mobile device management (MDM) solution, plan to adopt within the next 3 years.  Managing Director, Foad Fadaghi, commented, "The existing penetration of cloud MDM among Australian enterprises is under 10 per cent, indicating the market is poised to grow strongly as new options become available. Options for both on-premise and hosted-cloud delivery models will help drive adoption as IT managers choose the most suitable architecture."

Matthew Ball, Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand, BlackBerry said: "In this region, our focus is to give customers the tools needed to ensure secure mobile productivity today but also to future-proof with a scalable solution for tomorrow, so we are excited to announce the expansion of our partnership with imei as a BES12 hosting partner," said. "This also signals how we are creating value for our channel partners in Australia and New Zealand in the high-growth enterprise mobility market, and giving businesses, regardless of size or technical expertise, flexible access to the benefits of BES12."

BES12 simplifies the task of mobilising an organisation by providing a single command and control center for managing the availability and usage of devices, apps, activities and mission-critical data. With expanded EMM capabilities, BES12 can manage any mobile device usage model such as BYOD, COPE and COBO, and leverages BlackBerry's trusted global infrastructure.

"With BES12 Hosted, imei will offer our customers flexible, cost-effective and easy to handle hosting regardless of their size or mobile platform, enabling us to scale from one user to thousands without compromising on security, reliability or cost efficiency," said Tim Fussell, Founder & President of imei Pty Ltd.

The flexibility and scalability of the new BES12 architecture will allow customers to move easily and securely from on-premise environments to various cloud models, including private, public and hybrid(1). Key BES12 features include:

  • Comprehensive Cross-Platform EMM: Provides complete management and security for devices, applications and company data across all platforms and all tiers of device ownership and deployment models.
  • End-to-End Security: Leverages advanced encryption, containerization, application wrapping and BlackBerry's secure global network infrastructure. Provides end-to-end platform-level security that keeps an organization's data safe and secure while in transit and at rest.  
  • Scalable Architecture: Scalable up to 25,000 devices per server and 150,000 devices per domain. BES12 is designed to reduce deployment cost and complexity and ensure maximum uptime with support for active-active high availability.
  • Streamlined User Experience: Enables administrators to holistically manage all users, devices, policies and profiles natively, from one easy-to-use unified console. A new attribute-driven, endpoint management model enables more flexible management of devices, applications and data. Comprehensive reporting and dashboards simplify the management of complex fleets of devices. 
  • Industry Leading Total Cost of Ownership: In 2014, Strategy Analytics found that BES10 was the most cost effective multi-platform enterprise mobility management solution (2). With BES12, the TCO savings go even further.
  • Design for the Internet of Things: BES12 is the first BES platform that will extend beyond smartphones and tablets to support the management of things, including medical diagnostic equipment, industrial machinery and automobiles.
  • Global Support: All BES12 subscriptions include industry leading BlackBerry Technical Support Services to help manage the complexity and demanding requirements of mobility and evolving EMM strategies.

The new BES12 software will be available from imei from December 2014. For more information about imei, please see: http://www.imei.com.au/.

For more information about BES12 Hosted and to become a hosting partner, please visit: www.blackberry.com/hosting. For more information about BES12 please visit: https://au.blackberry.com/business

(1)     Private cloud today, and public cloud and hybrid architecture to come

For media inquiries, please contact:

BlackBerry PR agency (Text100)

Bianca.Georgiou@text100.com.au

+61299565733 or +61438105106

BlackBerry is a premier sponsor and exhibitor (located at stand PREM2) at Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2014, 17 - 20 November, Gold Coast Australia.

About imei

imei is a Managed Mobility Services  (MMS) company headquartered in Sydney, Australia and is focused on delivering best practice MMS to its enterprise and multinational clients. Founded in 2000 imei has a rich heritage in mobility and long standing relationship with BlackBerry installing some of the first BES servers in Australia in 2003. Managed Mobility Services encompass the IT and process services provided by an external service provider that are required to plan, procure, provision, activate, manage and support mobile devices, network services, management systems, mobile applications and application stores.          

About BlackBerry
A global leader in mobile communications, BlackBerry® revolutionized the mobile industry when it was introduced in 1999. Today, BlackBerry aims to inspire the success of our millions of customers around the world by continuously pushing the boundaries of mobile experiences. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, BlackBerry operates offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. The Company trades under the ticker symbols "BB" on the Toronto Stock Exchange and "BBRY" on the NASDAQ.www.blackberry.com

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