If there’s a tech firm that has taken the old saying “change comes from the top” to the heart, it’s BlackBerry. Thankfully for the firm, the call had been heeded by CEO John Chen.  Since tapping the software industry veteran last November to spearhead its uphill push to turn revenues around, the struggling phone maker has seen much of its senior leadership team replaced with company outsiders all boasting strong backgrounds in the enterprise space, which is not coincidentally where it has been is directing most of its growth efforts in recent years.

It’s also not an accident that the overwhelming majority of those new executives were part of Chen’s old team at Sybase. The database and mobile management vendor was on brink of bankruptcy when he took over the reins in in late 1998, trading at a record low with seemingly no way to break the four consecutive years of losses that led to his appointment. Twelve years later, Chen sold Sybase to business intelligence giant SAP for $5.8 billion, more than six times its value at the start of his tenure.

BlackBerry is counting on him to pull off the same stunt a second time, except on a much tighter deadline. In a bid to mitigate the challenge, the board has given Chen a free hand to hire as many of his former colleagues as he sees fit. The latest Sybase veteran to come on board Marty Beard, one of the most important additions yet.

Beard joins BlackBerry after a stint as the CEO of LiveOps, a provider of cloud-based contact center services that lists Salesforce.com, eBay, Coca Cola and other big names among its more than 300 customers. Before signing up for the company, he was responsible for the Sybase 365 suite of hosted messaging and cross-platform commerce services, which now goes by the name SAP Mobile Services.

Experienced services

The pattern is not  hard to spot: Beard was selected for his track record in cloud solutions, a prime focus for Chen.  Since his appointment as CEO, the phone maker quietly made its core BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) available for consumption as a service in a bid to drive further adoption of the mobility management platform. The solution continues to be used by thousands of organizations despite the sharp decline in the number of BlackBerry devices in the office, a drop offset the fact that BES supports iOS and Android, which means organizations can extend the security for which BlackBerries are known for to all the other devices on the corporate network.

Beard is assuming the role of chief operating officer effective immediately, a position in which he will not only be responsible for coordinating initiatives among the different business units but also marketing, the development of the BlackBerry 10 operating system and customer care. The inclusion of the latter in the list is atypical but not surprising given his time at LiveOps.

Equally significant as the responsibilities given to Beard is the title itself, which positions him as Chen’s right-hand man. That speaks to the central place of cloud computing in the CEO’s turnaround plan, which will likely see BlackBerry double down on services even more than it has since his appointment eight months ago.

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