If you thought your banged-up BlackBerry Bold 9900 was the last you’d see of the company, think again.
At its peak, BlackBerry’s mobile devices were inescapable. Harvey Specter from the popular drama series Suits had one. Record producer and singer Pharell had one. Even former US President Barack Obama had one.
However, while the company has long parted ways with its smartphone giant persona, it has successfully pivoted its brand cachet into another lucrative industry: cybersecurity.
King of mobile. BlackBerry VP and CISO Christine Gadsby told IT Brew that the brand, formerly known as Research In Motion (RIM) until 2013, practically became “synonymous” with mobile email and secure communications in its early days.
“It was popular, I think, with everybody,” Gadsby said. “I mean, I had one.”
According to Gadsby, the appeal of the company’s mobile devices was not just having a full keyboard at hand, but also the security and trust associated with the brand, whose products operated on its own operating system—a quality Gadsby told IT Brew was “always the big deal.”
Anetac security platform co-founder and CEO Timothy Eades told IT Brew that all changed when the iPhone—which made its debut in 2007—entered the smartphone scene, touting a “revolutionary” interface and usability design that caused BlackBerry to slowly falter.
“No matter how secure it was, the consumer relevance went away, or at least got lost,” Eades said.
Going through changes. As the company continued to lose market share in the smartphone industry, its upward trajectory in the software and cybersecurity industry was just beginning to brew. Eades told IT Brew that the company slowly began to “patch together” its relevancy under the leadership of former CEO John Chen and COO Vito Giallorenzo.
“They stitched together a series of acquisitions to transform the company,” he said.
Gadsby pointed to the company’s 2010 acquisition of QNX Software Systems, a real-time operating system from Harman International, as one of the key purchases that helped position the company where it is today. She told us that the Unix-like operating system—acquired prior to Chen’s tenure as CEO— has and continues to be used across various industries, including the medical device, industrial automation, and, perhaps most notably, the automotive sector.
“QNX is running in nearly every major automobile manufacturer, but one,” Gadsby said. “In every car that you drive, QNX is in it somewhere.”
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As of October 2024, QNX software is embedded in more than 255 million vehicles worldwide.
BlackBerry’s acquisition of German mobile security company Secusmart—which specializes in voice and data encryption and anti-eavesdropping solutions—four years later was another pivotal moment for the company, Gadsby told IT Brew. Chen in a statement accompanying the announcement of the acquisition at the time said the purchase would enhance BlackBerry’s security solutions.
By 2016, SecuSUITE solutions were used by over 20 countries around the globe.
According to Gartner, BlackBerry sold 207,900 devices in Q4 2016 and had a market share of 0.000481%. In the same quarter, the company more than doubled its software and licensing revenue.
“The depth of BlackBerry has always been that we provide that level of real-time security in this functional landscape,” Gadsby said. “And so you really saw that when we stopped in 2016 sort of moved to pivot in the software-focused business model.
Shedding its skin. In September 2016, BlackBerry announced it would no longer make its own smartphones as part of its transition to a software company. In 2022, the company pulled the plug on the legacy software and services that supported its classic smartphones.
Since then, the company has moved past its growing pains and gone full throttle as a cybersecurity, enterprise software, and IOT giant. In 2023, the company chose John Giamatteo, president of its cybersecurity business unit, to succeed Chen as CEO following his retirement. The Ontario, Canada-based company also made the decision to separate its IOT and cybersecurity businesses in the same year to “enhance the focus” of both businesses. During the company’s Q3 2025 earnings call, Giamatteo deemed the quarter a “significant inflection point” for BlackBerry and touted the performance of both divisions.
And as the cybersecurity giant continues to evolve, its core value that once helped to attract its loyal smartphone fanatics has remained intact 40 years later.
“If you think about BlackBerry as a brand as a whole, we’ve been doing secure communications longer than really anybody,” Gadsby said. “I mean, it’s our bread and butter and what we’ve known since 1984 when it started with a pager.”