We all recognize Blackberry as the company that once dominated the mobile phone industry, but failed badly as it missed the smartphone wave. While that’s entirely true, there has always been more to this Canadian company than meeting the consumer’s expectations- its security business. And that is exactly what the company is now betting upon for its resurrection.
As is now evident, autonomous cars are just around the corner and are set to disrupt at all verticals. The problem is, the code that runs on these connected cars are often millions of lines in length and a flaw in any of them can have serious security repercussions. This is what Blackberry is now attempting to solve. It has launched a cloud-based tool called ‘Jarvis’ that scans through those complex and lengthy software to detect and report security vulnerabilities.
This is particularly helpful because most of the automotive companies outsource these development tasks to third-parties, and maintaining quality while accepting deliveries can be very time-consuming. In one case study that Blackberry did with Jaguar Land Rover, they together worked on reducing the time from 30 days to 7 minutes! Yes, 7 minutes is all it took to detect flaws and deliver insights into the code.
Now, given that the software these cars use is one of the most sophisticated software ever built, Jarvis may just be solution car makers that have been waiting all along to tighten security loopholes and accelerate the development cycle.
The company offers Jarvis at pay-as-you-go basis- a predominant billing model in cloud services. While automotive industry remains its prime target, for now, other industries like healthcare, defense, aerospace, that deploy equally, if not more, complex software aren’t out of reach.