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Author's profile photo David Clavey

Blackberry in ex-Sybase John Chen’s hands

An interesting day yesterday with me waiting to see who would bid for Blackberry. Imagine my surprise when it turned out no one wanted them, and instead they appointed my old Boss from Sybase John Chen as executive chairman and interim Chief executive.

Previous to this appointment I was secretly thinking that Samsung might buy Blackberry for its OS and patents, But is seems all the contenders stepped back – Founders Mike and Doug; Prem Warsa; Samsung; Lenovo;Microsoft; Google; Facebook; IBM; Cisco. None put a bid in to my surprise. There was even a rumour that John Sculley ex Apple was a potential bidder with some Canadian investors.

Interesting lots of Google references this morning saying “who is John Chen”. well from my point of view he is a Man who knows how to turn a loss making company around by imposing very tight cost control. That’s what he did to Sybase, indeed some would say SUP was created as a MEAP simply to aid Sybase being bought by SAP. Whatever you think about John, and I have biased opinions on that one, he did successfully turn Sybase around and sell it to SAP. Which was good for Sybase, good for SAP and good for John.

So I think John Chen is exactly what Blackberry need at this moment, it will be interesting to see what happens next.

SAP – do you need a Mobile Phone company ?

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      Author's profile photo Michael Appleby
      Michael Appleby

      There's a man who likes a challenge! 

      Author's profile photo Midhun VP
      Midhun VP

      SAP really need a Mobile Phone Company ?

      In my opinion SAP, an enterprise software company depending on different mobile platforms don't need a mobile phone company. But SAP is capable to make BB as enterprise phone since SAP's "mantra" is accepted by most enterprises 😛 .

      Author's profile photo David Clavey
      David Clavey
      Blog Post Author

      I was joking 🙂

      Would be an interesting move, a software company doing hardware .... Microsoft .... Apple.

      Mobile Hana 🙂

      Hey perhaps as Blackberries have a keyboard you could make them run SAP GUI directly and miss out the whole SAP UI5 ....

      Author's profile photo Midhun VP
      Midhun VP

      Hahaha, SAP GUI in BB phones would be interesting. Desktop experience in mobile phones (with large form factor). Can be possible, may be in future.

      Author's profile photo David Clavey
      David Clavey
      Blog Post Author

      Certainly possible, but you would be mad to do it !

      And it would ruin my "Mobile First" strategy.

      Author's profile photo Jitendra Kansal
      Jitendra Kansal

      Fantastic Stuff !!!

      Now i will google about John Chen 😛