Last Monday, February 6th Ford announced that they would be participating in a session at the Wolfe Research Global Auto, Auto Tech, and Auto Consumer Conference to provide an update on their Ford+ growth plan. From the press release:
“Ford will answer questions about the Ford+ growth plan; how the company is overhauling its operations to improve quality and reduce costs; and its significant opportunities to expand capabilities and generate returns from software-enabled gas-powered and electric vehicles, along with value-added services.
To accelerate this transformation, Ford has created three distinct, customer-focused business segments: Ford Blue for iconic internal-combustion and hybrid vehicles,Ford Model e for breakthrough software and EVs, and Ford Pro for products and services that help commercial customers make over and grow their businesses.”
The next day Blackberry announced that they would be participating in two investor calls this week:
In light of my last post on the demand for QNX talent and these announcements, I wanted to take a quick look into the history of the partnership between Ford and Blackberry
Ford-Blackberry Partnership Timeline:
What’s really notable about these announcements is that, at least of the press releases that are on the Blackberry investor relations site, they are the first announcements that call out an OEM by name for using QNX software in the vehicle. From the October 31, 2016 press release:
“As part of this agreement, BlackBerry will dedicate a team to work with Ford on expanding the use of BlackBerry's QNX Neutrino Operating System, Certicom security technology, QNX hypervisor and QNX audio processing software. The terms of the deal are confidential.”
In a follow up to the press release, John Wall (SVP of Blackberry QNX) wrote in a blog post:
“Ford is an industry leader and the opportunity to contribute our world-class technology to their products is a privilege. Ford’s expanded application of our software and services illustrates the diverse and broad value we can bring to market,” said Chen.
The future of automotive is all about embedded intelligence, about delivering the reliable and highly secure experience that customers expect. As companies like Ford realize the promise of the connected car, BlackBerry will be standing alongside them, putting the smart in the car.
A few months later, in a Ford Press Release, the company indicated it would be opening up an R&D center in Ottawa to accelerate development of connected vehicles and services. In follow up reporting that same day, news hit that 400 Blackberry developers were being transitioned from Blackberry to Ford. From the techcrunch article:
“In order to have autonomy, the vehicle’s got to be connected, it’s just fundamental,” Gray explained. “The vehicle itself, whether there’s a driver or not, has to be communicating with the cloud for various reasons, so this group immediately is working on creating that connectivity spine or network upon which everything else can be built.”
“The majority [of hires from this announcement] are from BlackBerry,” he said, regarding the decision to place their new facility in Ottawa and the talent they’re drawing for the majority of this group of new employees. “Obviously they have deep skills, in embedded software, in mobile devices, in connectivity, and when you look at the subsets of products they work in – they work in RF, they work hardware, they work at the chip level, they work in operating systems, they have a renowned reputation for security and stability […] so it was a really good fit.”
Why does this matter?
So, about six years years ago (at the beginning of what would be a typical 5-7 year QNX design win cycle), Ford made the investment to bring in Blackberry QNX developers to work on embedded systems and security for connected vehicles straight from Blackberry. Essentially, Ford became a first mover for acquiring the QNX talent that is in demand today.
Since the 2016 shared press release and the announcement of the Ottawa R&D center, Ford and Blackberry have been silent on their partnership except for news that Ford would be dropping QNX infotainment in favor of Google which we now know has QNX running underneath Android Automotive.
That said, Ford is still hiring QNX developers for the Ottawa R&D center and for QNX talent globally.
We also know that Blackberry was running IVY on a current generation Ford Mustang Mach E. During the Q3 earnings call, John Chen made a note to say that they’d have a Jeep running IVY but the Mustang Mach E was news (as far as I know).
So, what exactly is the status of the current partnership? In 2021, Ford announced their new business plan - Ford+ and they released the Ford+ Connected Services video from their 2021 investor day which addresses the ways that Ford will create new revenue streams from new connected services.
I don’t know if we should expect anything tomorrow beyond general updates about QNX in the cloud and Ford+, but I’ll be watching to see if any news drops tomorrow. Blackberry follows up tomorrow with another call on Thursday.