BlackBerry appoints new chief operating officer from LiveOps Inc.
Posted Jul 21, 2014 08:11:25 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
BlackBerry (TSX:BB) has appointed Marty Beard, the former chief executive of LiveOps, Inc. as its new chief operating officer.
Beard starts immediately and will be responsible for such things as marketing, BlackBerry 10 app development and customer care and quality.
He was chairman and CEO of LiveOps, a provider of cloud applications for customer services. Before joining LiveOps, he was president of Sybase 365, a mobile messaging and mobile commerce services unit, and also worked at computer technology company Oracle.
BlackBerry is dedicating more resources to building its relationship with business customers under the leadership of chief executive John Chen, who joined the company last November. Before Chen took the job, he helped turn software company Sybase into a profitable operation focused on mobile business technology.
Chen’s strategy has set aside the consumer market as a priority, after the BlackBerry 10 line of phones failed to become a sales hit.
BlackBerry could feel some extra competition for business customers after details emerged of partnership between two of the world’s biggest technology companies – Apple and IBM – that will cater to business customers.
