BlackBerry’s John Sims discusses the future of BBM

BlackBerry’s new head of Enterprise and BBM, John Sims, has only been on the job for a few months but he already seems to be detailing his plans. He laid out to CNET some of his plans and goals for BBM and how 40% of BBM users are now on other platforms. He also said that he found of the 85 million users, 25 million were enterprise users who were just using it organically. That is why they developed enterprise focused eBBM.

If anything can keep the good ship BlackBerry sailing, it’s BBM. John Sims is the man charged with taking this slice of the BlackBerry pie and make it do two things — grow and make money. He’s been in the role just two short months, but speaking with CNET on the last day of Mobile World Congress 2014, he has a lot of big plans on both accounts. “Clearly, in the longer term, we have to monetize that investment in BBM,” said Sims. “One of the important dimensions for monetizing BBM is the enterprise. What we were hearing from enterprise customers was that they like the idea of the social chat medium, but they don’t like the fact it is uncontrolled. Particularly from regulated industries. They wanted it to be secure and to be controlled so they can meet their compliance requirements.”