At the company’s Enterprise Portfolio Launch event today, BlackBerry officially announced the public availability of BES12. The successor to the company’s BES10 enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution, BES12 allows IT admins to securely manage mobile devices across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BB10 and legacy BBOS.
BlackBerry is offering two pricing tiers for BES12, based on a per-device model. The BES12 Silver tier will cost $25 per device per year, or $45 per device per year with premium support. The BES12 Gold tier, which provides additional security features, will cost $80 per device per year, or $100 per device per year with premium support. Additional features, like the newly announced BBM Meetings, can be added to either tier at an additional top-up price. BlackBerry is also offering a migration program allowing legacy BES customers to upgrade to BES12 free of charge.
In addition to BES12, BBM Meetings, a partnership with Samsung, and pricing for the BlackBerry Classic, the Enterprise Portfolio Launch event featured a variety of other smaller announcements:
- WorkLife for BlackBerry is a new service to allow enterprises to add a separate corporate number to BYOD devices. Leveraging the acquisition of Movirtu’s Virtual SIM platform back in September, WorkLife for BlackBerry lets corporate voice, SMS, and data usage be charged to the company, while all other usage is charged to the employee.
- BlackBerry announced a new VPN authentication tool, which provides two-factor authentication to mobile employees via their network credentials rather than hardware tokens to access secure information.
- BlackBerry also announced partnership agreements with Salesforce and Brightstar, to give those company’s customers access to BlackBerry’s BES12 service offerings.
