Today Blackberry announced their new Blackberry 10 platform.  It sounds very interesting as it integrates social networking, enterprise security, dual personas, and more.  Here is an excerpt from an article written by Steve Costello, "At the heart of the new OS is the BlackBerry Hub, an integrated contacts and social networking app with support for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  Messages and updates can be read and posted without the need to leave BlackBerry Hub, and contact information can be viewed regardless of the app in which it is stored."

In a series of articles that I have written this week titled Mobile Devices, Management Structures and SMAC, I have shared my views that the SMAC stack (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) is a combination of technologies that as a combined foursome are transforming the world of business today.  You can download and read a great whitepaper on this subject here.  This announcement by Blackberry further solidifies my views.  Mobile and social supported by the cloud are embedded into the very operating system of the new Blackberrys. 

The article goes on to discuss support for dual personas in mobile devices, "It also supports the BlackBerry Balance feature, which enables users to switch between private and work profiles, with the ability to run both personal and work apps at the same time while keeping corporate data secure and encrypted."  I read corporate data to mean things like business analytics and other enterprise data and mobility apps.

Blackberry (they re-branded from Research in Motion/RIM to just Blackberry now), recognizes how important personal mobile devices are to people (think contacts, personal calendars, mobile wallets, photos, Facebook, mobile banking, etc.).  They seem to have embraced the BYOD trend and delivered a solution to address both personal and enterprise concerns.

In the book Grouped by Paul Adams, there is a very good line, "The web is being fundamentally rebuilt around people, because our online life is catching up with our offline life."  Blackberry seems to get this message and has delivered an operating system designed to accommodate it.

Read the rest of this series here - Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
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