BlackBerry building partner base and working with Check Point

BlackBerry and Check Point have formed a global ISV partnership strengthening the security proposition they can offer around mobile devices.

The two firms have put together the Check Point SandBlast Mobile detection software with BlackBerry's device management tools.

The combined offering, announced at the BlackBerry Security Summit in London, will be available to BlackBerry's channel partners with Check Point opting not to offer it to its reseller base at this stage.

"At the moment BlackBerry partners are selling the combined offering but it is something we could definitely explore," said Jeremy Kaye, vp of Mobile Security Solutions at Check Point Software Technologies.

The two vendors have gone over a channel alignment process to ensure that there are not too many gaps in market coverage and found that there is plenty of overlap.

"Both Check Point and BlackBerry  have very large solution providers, we have looked at a common set of channel partners as a common go-to-market efforts," said Peter Ng, head of the ISV ecosystem at BlackBerry.

"The channel alignment was very quick and it was very easy to work together because we already both work with most of the large channel players," added Kaye.

This is the first ISV agreement that Check Point has entered into and the firm indicated that for now it has no plans for further partnerships.

"We have thought long and hard about who we want to partner with and that is BlackBerry. I really believe this is going to go well and we have already identified lots of opportunities and have already closed some business together already," said Kaye.

"We are pretty happy doing this with BlackBerry right now and I don't think we have a strategic aspiration to start clouding the waters with other MDM vendors," he added.

The other channel development coming out of the summit was an update on the progress of the channel in taking BlackBerry's Spark enterprise of things platform out to market.

At the summit BlackBerry shared numbers revealing that enterprise ISV partners selling the technology had increased by 25% in the last year and 140 partners had joined the firm's enterprise channel programme in the last quarter.

"As more partners choose to work with BlackBerry, our global ecosystem grows to offer our customers cutting-edge solutions to complex business problems," said Mark Wilson, CMO at BlackBerry.