BlackBerry Sees ‘Large’ Opportunity With AWS for Ivy Vehicle Data Platform

Under BlackBerry’s agreement with Amazon Web Services to develop and market BlackBerry’s cloud-based intelligent vehicle data system, code-named Ivy, to automotive OEMs, BlackBerry “will own all the commercial relationships with customers” and will share revenue with AWS, said BlackBerry CEO John Chen on a fiscal Q3 investor call Thursday. AWS and BlackBerry announced the agreement Dec. 1. Modern vehicles generate huge amounts of data, but the auto industry “is not prepared to capture and create value from the analytics” because the data are difficult to collect and monetize “without very costly integrations,” said Chen. Ivy’s task “is to make it easy to gather, securely transport and analyze these data in a standard and a cost-efficient way across multiple brands and models on a common platform,” he said. The multiyear pact with AWS is an “exclusive co-development and co-marketing agreement,” he said. “This type of agreement is rare. BlackBerry and AWS engineers have been working very closely to jointly build the platform.” The effort will yield “an ecosystem of apps and services developed on the BlackBerry Ivy platform over time,” he said. The platform’s “recurring revenue model” will monetize data analytics apps and services on per-use and subscription bases, he said. “An important difference between BlackBerry Ivy and competitors in this space is that we allow the OEM to own the data and with that the relationship with their customers. We’re already in discussion with some automakers who were granted early access and we have received positive initial feedback.” The target is to commercialize the first Ivy apps and services in time for automakers’ 2023 model year, he said. “While it is too early for us to provide a revenue outlook, we are confident that BlackBerry Ivy addresses a very large market opportunity.”