BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) is fast losing confidence of its longtime fan base of Canadian Businesses customers, who are now forced to rethink the way they plan to spend their future technology budgets.
BlackBerry making efforts to retain corporate clients
The pessimism regarding BlackBerry remains amongst almost every business irrespective of size, which has forced the company to adopt defensive measure about its device management infrastructure, says a report from CBC News.
A few days back, BlackBerry released an update for its Enterprise server, the security management system that is used by a host of corporate and government clients. According to the Waterloo Ontario based company, multiple changes have been introduced that will bring down the cost for customers who have a large number of devices on the system.
BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB) took some cost cutting measures after it received feedback from few of its prestigious corporate clients that the services are expensive, and as a response they are shifting to other such services.
Loyal clients departing
Clients like Bank of Montreal and TD Bank changed their smartphone management system from BlackBerry, earlier this year. In the United Sates, there are many business customers such as Pfizer and the U.S. defense department who moved from BlackBerry and stopped using its services exclusively to cope up with any sudden emergency.
In a letter recently, BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB)’s interim CEO John Chen asked the loyal companies to stick with BlackBerry.
“Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,” John Chen wrote in the letter. He said that BlackBerry would once again strengthen its core segment of providing services to the Business users.
Government and business clients have been faithful to BlackBerry for a long time, and there was a time when these clients signed a multi-year deal with BlackBerry for its service known as BES. Many of those clients opted to renew the contracts, but due to expensive services and growing popularity of ‘bring your own device’ for employees, some of them switched to other services.
Competitors threaten BlackBerry
Many new entrants, like AirWatch LLC and Samsung Knox, are aggressively promoting their services as a substitute to BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) (TSE:BB).
BlackBerry’s senior director of enterprise product management, Jeff Holleran believes that a major cause behind BlackBerry porting its apps on Android and iPhone was the loss of customers. “For us the move to cross-platform is to bring our customers back,” Holleran said.
“We do have customers coming back to us,” he added. However, the Canadian firm did not mention the name of the clients that came back.
