{"id":52947,"date":"2014-02-11T08:28:38","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T06:28:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=52947"},"modified":"2014-02-11T08:28:38","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T06:28:38","slug":"blackberrys-bbm-loses-its-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/mobile\/52947\/blackberrys-bbm-loses-its-head\/","title":{"rendered":"BlackBerry&#8217;s BBM loses its head"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>BlackBerry Ltd said on Monday that Andrew Bocking, the executive in charge of its BBM instant messaging business, has left the company.<\/p>\n<p>The Waterloo, Ontario-based company did not disclose whether Bocking&#8217;s departure was part of an internal management shuffle or whether he left to pursue other interests.<\/p>\n<p>The technology company, which is seeking to rebuild itself under the leadership of new Chief Executive John Chen, said only that Bocking &#8220;made the decision to leave BlackBerry&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Since taking the reins late last year, Chen has reshuffled management ranks and has signaled that he plans to focus more on the company&#8217;s services, or enterprise, business, which manages smartphone traffic on the internal networks of corporate and government clients.<\/p>\n<p>BlackBerry said John Sims, who heads the company&#8217;s enterprise segment, will add the BBM team to his organization. The company said it plans to build on BBM&#8217;s strength in messaging and expand it into new areas, including mobile marketing, community building and enterprise messaging.<\/p>\n<p>News of Bocking&#8217;s departure was reported initially by tech news website BGR earlier on Monday.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\">More on BlackBerry and BBM<\/h3>\n<p><a title=\"Wait, BlackBerry is growing?\" href=\"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/mobile\/48113\/wait-blackberry-is-growing\/\"><strong>Wait, BlackBerry is growing?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a title=\"BBM for Android, iPhone frenzy\" href=\"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/mobile\/48111\/bbm-for-android-iphone-frenzy\/\"><strong>BBM for Android, iPhone frenzy<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a title=\"BlackBerry rolls out BBM to Android, iOS\" href=\"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/mobile\/48008\/blackberry-rolls-out-bbm-to-android-ios\/\"><strong>BlackBerry rolls out BBM to Android, iOS<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a title=\"BlackBerry sale an extension, not a solution\" href=\"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/mobile\/46517\/blackberry-sale-an-extension-not-a-solution\/\"><strong>BlackBerry sale an extension, not a solution<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BlackBerry Ltd said on Monday that Andrew Bocking, the executive in charge of its BBM instant messaging business, has left the company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":48114,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[25,1625,161],"class_list":["post-52947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobile","tag-active","tag-bbm","tag-blackberry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52953,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52947\/revisions\/52953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}