Blackberry Acquires Virtual SIM Provider To Separate Personal And Work Numbers On Any Mobile Device

Today, Blackberry announced that it has acquired a virtual SIM company called Movirtu. This seems like a move that's meant to help the company become stronger in the enterprise market, even as more enterprise customers start using Android and iOS devices instead of Blackberries.

Movirtu's virtual SIM solution allows a user to have both a personal and a work number on the same phone, even if the phone itself isn't a dual-SIM model. In fact, this solution can work on iPhones and on any Android device, too, which could be quite appealing to some enterprise customers if they want to let their employees use their own phones at work (BYOD) or want to let them use their personal numbers on the devices given by the company.

Since Blackberry's phones are barely relevant these days in terms of market share, new Blackberry CEO John Ceo is trying to restructure the company to focus on services such as mobile data security, something for which Blackberry used to be recognized (and still is somewhat), and mobile device management. Blackberry has a small window of opportunity to do this right and to convince enterprise customers that they should be using its services.

"In a BYOD and COPE world, there remain a number of efficiency and convenience challenges facing enterprises, employees and mobile operators alike," said John Chen, Executive Chairman and CEO, BlackBerry. "The acquisition of Movirtu complements our core strategy of providing additional value added services, and it will leverage our key assets, including our BES platform, along with our existing global infrastructure which is connected to a large number of mobile operators around the world."

The virtual SIM capabilities will be provided by Blackberry through mobile operators around the world and on all major mobile platforms. Movirtu's virtual SIM solution will be joining other complementary Blackberry solutions for separating the personal environments from the work environments as a security measure, such as BlackBerry's Secure Work Space and BlackBerry Balance.

Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

Lucian Armasu
Lucian Armasu is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He covers software news and the issues surrounding privacy and security.