BlackBerry buys Movirtu to take the pain out of business phone bills
BlackBerry Ltd. is now officially on an acquisition streak after the Thursday purchase of a London-based startup called Movirtu Ltd., that tackles one of the more subtle challenges to have emerged from the proliferation of employee-owned devices in the workplace. No financial terms were disclosed for the deal.
Movirtu sells SIM virtualization software that makes it possible to use separate numbers for work-related and personal calls on the same device. The concept is similar to that behind full-blown sandboxing solutions such as Dell Inc.’s recently introduced Business Phone software, but it’s applied to an entirely different challenge: reimbursing workers for their monthly data charges.
Half of organizations that allow the use of personal devices in the office let staff foot the bill for business calls as of 2013, according to a survey by Good Technology Inc., the Sunnyvale-based mobile security specialist. That’s usually because of the sheer amount of hassle that’s historically been involved in the process of logging work-related activities.
Movitru’s offering, which supports BlackBerry as well as iOS and Android devices, simplifies life for customers with an automated approach to billing mobile activity that not only makes it easier to handle the financial details but also ensures that each party is only paying for what they use. The platform enables organizations to disable business calls for employee-owned devices after work hours and during holidays and automatically shuts down virtual lines after workers leave a company.
BlackBerry plans to bake Movitru’s software into its flagship enterprise mobility management platform. That should provide a level of granularity that rival vendors do not yet offer, giving the Canadian firm an important differentiator as its refocuses on the enterprise software market.
The deal comes hot on the heels of BlackBerry’s acquisition of another European startup called Secusmart GmbH, which developed anti-eavesdropping software used throughout the continent to maintain the privacy of important government figures such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. No terms were disclosed for that acquisition either.
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