Blackberry, through its most recent release of BES 10, its latest version of its on-premise enterprise smartphone management server, is bringing secure workspace capabilities to iOS and Android smartphones.

One of the initial pillars of BES 10 when announced was that of a multi-platform MDM. Essentially, it has the ability to manage Blackberries as well as other popular smartphone platforms including iOS and Android. This was a significant step for Blackberry that has only helped curb the stream of BES removals. In fact, while Blackberry has seen the decay of its customer base accelerate to under 79 million users, BES removals are nowhere close to that rate of decline. While upgrades to BES10 continue to plod along, Blackberry is clearing playing to the desires and fears of IT to keep its BES base more stable than its handhelds have been.

Blackberry Balance, which brings a secure container for work data and applications to BB10 devices through a dual-persona paradigm, has been a growing interest in IT managers that are struggling with the wave of devices coming in through BYOD. Blackberry’s push towards a cross platform container only adds to the growing number of services designed to help support the mix use of mobile devices.

AT&T Toggle: Based on OpenPeak Inc.’s device management platform, Toggle divides work from personal data on Android and iOS devices.

Red Bend Software: Offers its True Solution for BYOD, using a Type 1 hypervisior for a virtual machine architecture that separate corporate and personal workspaces on iOS and Android. Red Bend recently announced a partnership with Samsung to offer enterprise trials of dual persona Galaxy S IIIs.

Fixmo SafeZone: Is a multi-platform, dual persona solution designed to the security requirements of government agencies. It powers a number of commercial device management solutions and partners with Cellrox to extend that company's thin virtualization technology developed for Android to iOS devices.

VMware Horizon Mobile: Creates a dual persona environment, but on Android only.

Samsung Knox: Available only on Samsung’s own Android-based devices, Knox creates a dual persona on Samsung’s future devices. It is not possible to install Knox on existing Samsung Android devices.

Early Further Details on Blackberry latest announcement:

• The future update to BES 10 will extend secure workspace capabilities for iOS and Android for data-at-rest as well as data-in-transit.
• The update provides secure client applications for email, calendar, contacts, tasks, memos, browsing and documents edited on the mobile device.
• Additional applications, including line-of-business applications, can be added to the secured workspace

Links to relevant additional research:   

 "Samsung making Android SAFE for Enterprises with Knox?” http://www.strategyanalytics.com/default.aspx?mod=reportabstractviewer&a0=8255

 “Research no Longer In Motion as BlackBerry Jams on”  http://www.strategyanalytics.com/default.aspx?mod=reportabstractviewer&a0=8164

“BYOD Realities”  http://www.strategyanalytics.com/default.aspx?mod=reportabstractviewer&a0=7853

View the presentation slides from Strategy Analytics Breakfast Presentation at MWC 2012.

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Strategy Analytics projects the global UC software and services market will surpass the $7 billion revenue mark in 2011 and achieve an annual growth rate of 9%

With one out of every three workers in the global workforce being mobile, any UC or fixed-mobile converged solution that does not have mobile at its core is not addressing the needs of businesses.

Mobile UC solutions are designed to streamline and improve the mobile worker's ability to communicate and share information with colleagues, customers, and partners. The market for such solutions is still emerging and consists of a disparate group of vendors driven by the rise in personal-liable purchasing, the need for cost cutting, and the availability of mobile device management (MDM) solutions to manage such devices

The market for such solutions is still emerging and consists of a disparate group of vendors including enterprise networking/telecom customer premises equipment (CPE) providers (e.g. Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Siemens), mobile platform and software providers (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, RIM), and pure-play mobile UC vendors (e.g. Aastra, DiVitas, ShoreTel - Agito Networks). Several other players exist in this market, and more are sure to emerge, but those included in this report comprise the most visible in the market today.

Client reading