BlackBerry lays off 250 new product testing staff

Blackberry is laying off 250 employees, or around 2 percent of its workforce, at its new product testing facility, the company said on Friday.

"These employees were part of the New Product Testing Facility, a department that supports BlackBerry's manufacturing and R&D efforts," BlackBerry said in an emailed statement. The employees, all working in Waterloo, Canada, were informed of their termination on Tuesday, the company said

"This is part of the next stage of our turnaround plan to increase efficiencies and scale our company correctly for new opportunities in mobile computing. We will be as transparent as possible as those plans evolve," the company said.

Although BlackBerry reported a 9 percent year-on-year rise in revenue for its most recent fiscal quarter, ended June 1, the company is struggling to maintain profitability, reporting an US$84 million loss for the period. The company disappointed analysts with sales figures for its Z10 and Q10 smartphones running the new BlackBerry OS 10. It sold 6.8 million smartphones in that fiscal quarter, almost a million fewer than analysts had expected. In the course of year it saw its smartphone market share more than halved, from 6.4 percent in the first calendar quarter of 2012 to 2.9 percent a year later.

The latest staff cuts are minor compared to those BlackBerry has made in recent years. In 2011 it laid of 2,000 staff, or a little more than 10 percent of its workforce at the time, leaving it with 17,000 staff.

Then in June 2012 it said it would lay off approximately 5,000 employees by March this year. The layoffs were part of the company's Cost Optimization and Resource Efficiency program that focused on delivering annual operational savings of at least $1 billion. By March it had slimmed down to around 12,700 employees.

Security company to release testing tool for SAP mobile access

As SAP invests heavily in mobile, a security testing company will release a tool next month to ensure mobile-accessible SAP systems are not vulnerable to hackers.

Boston-based Onapsis will release a new module for its X1 security suite, a product that performs automated security assessments, penetration testing and compliance audits for SAP’s ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, said Mariano Nunez, Onapsis’ CEO.

The module will focus in part on the SAP Mobile Platform, formerly known as the Sybase Unwired Platform Developer Center, which helps developers build SAP mobile applications for different devices and platforms. It also looks at the NetWeaver Gateway, an SAP server that links devices to back-end systems, Nunez said.

Exposing those back-end systems is complicated, and companies can face a risk of hacking if the systems are misconfigured or do not have up-to-date patches.

“We see that companies may not be paying enough attention to that and forgetting the devices,” Nunez said. “Our empirical experience shows those systems are usually left insecure because of people not applying the latest patches or not following SAP’s best security practices.”

SAP is focused on mobile access, device management and security as more companies embrace bring-your-own-device policies. SAP supports iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices.

Sanjay Poonen, head of SAP’s mobile division, said at the Sapphire Now conference in May that the company has more than 1,000 people working on mobile-related projects in areas such as retail, banking and consumer package goods.

Last year, SAP reported more than €222 million ($293 million) in license revenue from its mobile-related business, a revenue stream that didn’t exist two and half years prior, Poonen said.

“We think this market is really poised for an even bigger opportunity if you go even beyond devices,” Poonen said. “This world is going to require us to think of mobile security in a whole new way.”
Nunez said companies faces risks if, for example, a CRM (customer relationship management) system is incorrectly configured for access by mobile devices, opening a door for hackers using attack tools for Web services.

X1’s mobile security module looks at what functions and processes are exposed in the back-end systems and not on the mobile application itself, Nunez said. It alerts users to security vulnerabilities and tells users how to fix the issues. The module is scheduled to be released next month, and will be free to X1 subscribers.

Onapsis is also scheduled to present two SAP security workshops at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, which kicks off on July 27. The workshops, which are not product focused, will look at SAP security from an academic perspective, Nunez said.