17 years later, Blackberry shoots itself in the bag and this time it has nothing to do with mobiles but with cars

It may never be completely out of the picture, but the truth is that BlackBerry has reemerged in recent hours after announcing that it has signed a multi-year agreement with Amazon Web Services to develop and market BlackBerry IVY, a scalable, cloud-connected intelligent vehicle data platform.

Although the company, known for its handheld devices that have made push mail popular, has been working for years on a solution for the connected vehicle market, it was after the announcement of the collaboration with AWS that it has been upgraded to the stock market. BlackBerry shares soared and made it the best day for investors since December 23, 2003, when its stock rose 51%.

The bet for the IoT in the automotive sector

BlackBerry once had 20% of the cell phone market, but today it is a very different company. **Its bet is on the Internet of Things (IoT) market. Although it has specific products for various industries, connected cars is one of its big bets. Already in 2010 it acquired QNX, a software that has improved for this market of connected vehicles and one of the pillars of BlackBerry IVY.

The BlackBerry IVY platform aims to provide car manufacturers with a standardized and secure way to read and analyze vehicle sensor data, in order to have a practical understanding of all this information.

As advocated by BlackBerry, the IVY platform will support multiple automotive operating systems as well as multiple cloud implementations. IVY is based on BlackBerry’s QNX automatic data capabilities and AWS services, including IoT and machine learning capabilities.

Balckberry claimed earlier this year that its QNX software was already present in over 175 million vehicles worldwide. This is software that has been in development for many years, since as early as 2014 Ford decided to opt for this solution instead of Microsoft’s.

In the car and in the cloud

BlackBerry IVY will be able to run within the systems that carry the vehicles (both cars and trucks), but will be managed and configured remotely from the cloud. According to AWS and Blackberry, with this platform car manufacturers will be able to have greater visibility of vehicle data, control who can access it and take advantage of the cloud, especially in terms of speed and efficiency when processing the data.

For example, by analyzing performance data in real time, automakers could recognize if there are defective parts inside the vehicles, implement codes to identify which vehicles are affected, notify the drivers of those vehicles and make specific recalls instead of having to call everyone in for review.

The IVY platform will also allow car manufacturers to develop some features, such as indications of road conditions, performance and driving behavior of each user or battery use in the case of electric cars. The objective is that they can also develop new customer experiences thanks to this platform.

Car manufacturers will be able to remotely deploy and update the software from the platform’s cloud-based console.

How to take advantage of sensor data

Increasingly, cars include a variety of sensors that generate data in unique and specialized formats. In addition, when they are manufactured, thousands of parts from many different suppliers are joined together, so that in the end each vehicle model is unique in terms of its hardware and software components. This makes it difficult to access and manage all this information. Also, there is currently no standard for analyzing and processing the data of the connected vehicles.

The challenge of AWS and BlackBerry is to solve these complications, not only by applying automatic learning to this data to generate knowledge and predictive inferences, but facilitating the collaboration of different actors.

Thus, the BlackBerry toolkit aims to make it easier for car manufacturers to collaborate with developers to create new services around optimizing vehicle performance, reduce maintenance costs and perform remote software updates on vehicles.