BlackBerry said earlier this month that it will explore strategic alternatives, and now it looks like it may be ready to make its popular BlackBerry Messenger service a stand-alone company. The report comes from The Wall Street Journal, and says that the new unit would be called BBM Inc. A sale of the BBM unit could be a possible next step, or BlackBerry could sell its hardware business and continue as a software company under the BBM name.
BlackBerry Messenger has about 60 million users worldwide and is particularly popular in India, the world’s second largest mobile market. The messaging service users BlackBerry’s proprietary network, and offers a secure alternative to text messaging. It allows photo sharing and group messaging, and makes it easy for users to see when message they sent has been opened and read by the recipient.
Millions of BBM fans rejoiced earlier this summer when BlackBerry said that it will make BBM available for both the iOS and Android operating systems. So far, BBM has not appeared in the Google Play store or the iTunes store, but the company has reportedly launched trials with iOS and Android users. In early August, Samsung issued a press release trumpeting the upcoming launch of BBM for all Galaxy phones in Africa. That release also said that BBM would be in the Google Play store soon.
The launch of BlackBerry’s new apps for iOS and Android is generating a more positive buzz than the launch of its new smartphones, a sign that BlackBerry may have a future as a software company. In addition to BBM, the company offers mobile device management software for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices. Its MDM solution, called Mobile Fusion, offers enterprise customers security, applications management, and the ability to give employees two different accounts so that they can separate work data from personal data on a single device.
Meanwhile, BlackBerry’s future in hardware is uncertain. The Canadian company had a whopping 40% of the smartphone market just five years ago. Today, the Canadian company has less than 3% of the market. Samsung is the new market leader, with 31% of the smartphone market in Q2, according to Gartner.
The recently launched Z10 smartphone is BlackBerry’s response to the rise of the touchscreen smartphone, but sales of the new model have been sluggish. Hoping to maintain its current customers, and perhaps win back some who miss their old BlackBerries, the company also launched the Q10 this year with a QWERTY keyboard. But BlackBerry seems to be realizing that customers are less interested in the functionality of its products than in that of its software.
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