Blackberry (formerly "Research In Motion")

[rogerwilco]

I wonder how much more upside there is for bbry's QNX licensing.... And given QNX is already on most vehicle, i do not know if we can see real gains unless BBRY sells QNX and realise a profit.

Selling QNX division, like selling BBM division, is a possibility however I think it would be more interesting (and certainly challenging) if Blackberry can expand QNX into other vertical market besides automotive and becomes more dominant OS in the machine to machine market (aka Internet of Things).

Reading the transcript for last quarterly call, I think that's what current management is trying to do.

From the transcript

The four units are, as you’ve seen it, handset device units, enterprise software and services, the BBM, the BlackBerry Messenger unit, and the QNX, the embedded, I would call it, machine-to-machine business unit. Again, this lineup, we’re focusing on execution and operation excellence. We’re making some major changes in leadership.

...

Let’s go to QNX, which is probably one of the crown jewels. Every time I come here, our partners call me, and customers call me, they really really want to work with us on QNX. It is an embedded technology, a microkernel technology. Most of you know. We dominate the automotive industries, at 40 OEMs and in all kinds of types of platforms in cars. In fact, we’re going to showcase one at the CES show, January 6 to 9, I believe, in Las Vegas. So if you happen to be there, please stop by our booth to take a look at our new technology there.

The plan is to invest in this and grow. The plan is to grow by other verticals, because we are doing very well in the automotive vertical. We’re going to continue to focus on that, but we’re going to start looking in adjacent verticals to expand the business. In addition to that, we’re going to build a platform that is cloud-based, that is going to be machine-to-machine based architecture.

And again, I think if anybody has been following all things Internet, if you think about that or all things mobile that is going to be the next frontier, the M2M. And the good news about BlackBerry is we already are in that space, and we’re working on that, and we have the basic technology for it. This microkernel is extremely strong. And if anybody wants to talk about that, I’d be more than happy to engage in that conversation.