Today, at BlackBerry’s Enterprise Event in San Francisco, Blackberry made a series of announcements related to the company's expanded enterprise portfolio, which now includes a new mobile-device management and security platform. Blackberry announced the BES12, a cross-platform EMM solution by BlackBerry with support for all major mobile platforms. The solution simplifies the task of mobilizing an organization by providing a single command and control center for managing the availability and usage of devices, apps, activities and mission-critical data.

BES12 provides expanded EMM capabilities that can manage any mobile device usage model such as BYOD, COPE and COBO, and leverages BlackBerry’s global infrastructure. The platform supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS. It leverages advanced encryption, containerization, application wrapping. BES12 is scalable up to 25,000 devices per server and 150,000 devices per domain. Administrators are able to holistically manage all users, devices, policies and profiles natively, from one unified console.

In addition, BlackBerry Blend for the Enterprise, also announced today, makes it possible for employees to securely access personal and work data from their BlackBerry smartphone on any desktop or tablet.

WorkLife by BlackBerry will allow enterprises to add a separate corporate phone number to personal devices brought in by their employees — or for the employee to add a separate personal phone number to a corporate-liable device provided by the company. This will enable voice, SMS and data usage to be charged to the company while all other usage is charged directly to the employee.

Enterprise Identity by BlackBerry will provide organizations a simple way to manage secure access to cloud-based services, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and internal apps, with a single point of entitlement, control and audit.

Enterprise Identity benefits will include:

• Single point of control: Provides control over and management of access to a wide range of services, offering policies for entitlement and authentication. The solution helps achieve compliance, offering reporting and auditing across cloud services. And with the BlackBerry Identity Proxy, it’s possible to securely take advantage of the power of an existing on-premise directory without copying or syncing sensitive corporate data to the cloud.
• One person, identity and sign on: An employee has one sign on for all their enterprise applications, eliminating the need for the employee to manage and recall many usernames and passwords.

VPN Authentication by BlackBerry will provide Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-based, two-factor authentication. This will allow mobile professionals to use something they know – their network credentials – with something they have – their iOS, Android or BlackBerry 10 smartphone – to achieve secure access to corporate content behind the firewall, eliminating the need for costly hardware tokens. And with Active Directory integration, IT can deploy and control VPN access and configuration of user profiles.

The solution can be customized to an organization’s policies with tailored authentication methods for different user groups. Get two-factor authentication by choosing device or Active Directory credentials as the first factor, while one-click acceptance on the smartphone acts as the second factor.

VPN Authentication by BlackBerry has no upfront or perpetual license costs, and will start at $3 USD per user, per month (billed annually). Enterprise Identity by BlackBerry and VPN Authentication by BlackBerry will be available later this year.

BBM Meetings provides a collaboration app that allows voice and video conferences for groups of up to 25 people on BlackBerry 10 or Android smartphones, and also on Windows or Mac.

With BBM Meetings, you can initiate or schedule a video and audio conference from your mobile device. Attendees can be invited from your local or company address book by BBM or email. All your meetings are instantly added to your device calendar.

BBM Meetings also makes it easy to turn any BBM chat, multi person chat, group chat or Voice call into a live BBM Meeting with a touch of a button.

When it’s time to meet your phone rings. Answer it just like a voice call and you’re in the meeting ready to go, without the need to struggle with conference IDs, passcodes and PINs.

BBM Meetings is also designed first for the mobile participant, so you can present from your device of choice – mobile or desktop.

Secure Voice Solutions by BlackBerry, offered in conjunction with BlackBerry’s partner Secusmart, ensures secure mobile voice and data communication.

Blackberry also announced a strategic partnership with Samsung Electronics to provide a secure mobility solution for Android. Available early next year enterprise customers will have a new choice: a tightly integrated, end-to-end secure solution that brings together BES12 with Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablets that include Samsung KNOX.

Samsung will resell BES12 to joint customers and BlackBerry will offer KNOX support as part of the Gold family of BES12 subscriptions. Pricing will be announced upon availability. Priocing details were not announced.

Blackberry also entered into an agreement with Salesforce to connect Salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) apps and platforms to BlackBerry’s EMM solution. Through this partnership, BlackBerry and Salesforce.com joint customers, particularly in regulated industries, will have access to a secure cross-platform, mobile end-to-end solution.

Brightstar, the world’s largest wireless distribution company, will distribute BES12.

Last but not least, Blackberry has officially opened the pre-orders for the BlackBerry Classic. The device is a familiar form factor with a QWERTY keyboard, navigation keys, a trackpad, a large square touch screen and the upgraded power and performance of BlackBerry 10.

It is planned to run on the latest version of BlackBerry OS 10.3.1 and offer access to BlackBerry World and the Amazon Appstore. It supports the following US network bands:

FD-LTE: 1, 2/25, 4, 5, 7, 13, 17
HSPA +: 1, 2, 4, 5/6

Among the major US carriers, this banding is not compatible with CDMA based networks (Verizon, Sprint, US Cellular). Priced at $449 (unlocked), the BlackBerry Classic is expected to start shipping in December.

The new products and services are the backbone of BlackBerry Chief Executive John Chen's plan to turn around the smartphone pioneer, whose devices have lost ground to Apple's iPhone, Samsung's Galaxy devices and a slew of other gadgets powered by Google's Android operating system.

BlackBerry is pivoting to focus on services and the demands of a large base of enterprise clients that are increasingly grappling with data security concerns.