BlackBerry Adds AI, Cybersecurity With Cylance Acquisition

…a “big endorsement of the vendor’s technology and, hopefully, a harbinger of continued innovation,” Gonsalves said.

Stuart McClure, Cylance’s co-founder, chairman and CEO, said his company’s cybersecurity workforce and market leadership in next-generation endpoint solutions will be a “perfect fit within BlackBerry where our customers, teams and technologies will gain immediate benefits from BlackBerry’s global reach.”

“We are eager to leverage BlackBerry’s mobility and security strengths to adapt our advanced AI technology to deliver a single platform,” he said.

Rik Turner, principal analyst at Ovum, said Cylance was a “phenomenal marketing outfit” that pushed the next-generation endpoint protection story to the maximum, “casting all the ‘old guard’ of endpoint security vendors as passe, much to their chagrin.”

However, Cylance suffered some setbacks, including being labeled as “something of a one-trick pony, that trick being machine learning,” he said.

“Since then Cylance has added an endpoint detection and response (EDR) capability but the feeling has remained that their game was up, so no big surprise that they have been sold,” Turner said. “More surprising is the buyer, but then I no longer follow BlackBerry like I used to. I don’t think of BlackBerry as a heavy hitter in security.”