DEVELOPERS BLOG

Forrester’s Application Development & Delivery Forum

EVENTS / 10.24.14 / BlackBerry

Below is a guest post by Brent Thornton & Nick Scozzaro from the Enterprise Solutions team.

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Last week, Nick Scozzaro and Brent Thornton were invited as BlackBerry sponsors to host the breakfast keynote at the Forrester Forum for Application Development Professionals in Chicago. The theme of the event was Build Software That Powers Your Business, and here is their story…

Being ever so thankful for the miracle of our dated regional aircraft making it through a rough flight, we arrived at the Swissotel excited for what was to come.

It was an honor to be among some of the brightest minds in the industry to deliver the breakfast keynote on developing applications within a BlackBerry Enterprise Server environment and applying the four pillars of enterprise development: Connectivity, Management, Standards, and Push Notifications (Click Here).

The room was packed, and the fresh smell of coffee and bacon set the stage for an interactive presentation with our attendees. After a brief business and product update, Brent described in detail the 4-pillar principles to developing successful enterprise apps. It’s a proven strategy that has worked not only for our customers, but also for ourselves here. Nick then demonstrated how BlackBerry applied the four pillars in one of their key internal products called BB Now.

BB Now is an internal custom application that was developed to mobilize all aspects of our business, furthering BlackBerry as a Mobile First leader.  Having our business evolve in the cross-platform capability space, we have developed our internal apps to be cross-platform by applying the BlackBerry 4-pillar strategy.

The keynote attendees were clearly intrigued and excited about our internal initiatives, which led to some great conversations about what it means to be a Mobile First company. For the remainder of the event, it was pretty cool to be known as “those BlackBerry guys with the amazing app” and constantly being stopped for a personal demo of BB Now.

Many thanks to Forrester, their event staff, and the people of Chicago for a great show!

Stay tuned for a future article on BB Now in the coming weeks.

Also at Forrester was the “Vendor Throwdown: Digital Experience Platform Providers” panel,

moderated by Forrester Research’s top analyst, Ted Schadler (author of the book The Mobile Mind Shift).

It was a lively debate with digital experience providers Sitecore, Adobe, and Acquia. Key themes revolved around the “Age of the Customer,” relating specifically to digital experiences.

Schadler moderated the session, using his new BlackBerry Passport to reference his notes. He mentioned to BlackBerry before the session, “I was going to use my Kindle, but thought this would be better.”

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About BlackBerry

BlackBerry is an enterprise software and services company focused on securing and managing IoT endpoints.