BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo, centre, rings the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange last year. His company has promised Alloy Kore will substantially increase the revenues it derives from its QNX software business.Jeenah Moon/Reuters
BlackBerry Ltd. BB-T has secured a US$100-million-plus deal for its new Alloy Kore automotive software with Coretura AB, a joint venture between truck-making giants Daimler Truck and Volvo Group.
It’s a watershed contract for the Waterloo, Ont.-based technology stalwart. Blackberry has promised Alloy Kore will substantially increase the revenues it derives from its QNX software business, whose products are already featured in more than 275 million vehicles globally, and accelerate the company’s ongoing revival under the leadership of chief executive officer John Giamatteo.
BlackBerry has also promised that Alloy Kore, which it developed jointly with German technology company Vector Informatik GmbH, will help vehicle makers build increasingly software-defined vehicles more quickly, efficiently and cost effectively.
“Coretura was founded to advance mobility at the speed of ideas,” said the Gothenburg, Sweden-based joint venture’s CEO, Johan Lunden, in a release. Selecting Alloy Kore to help power a digital platform for commercial vehicles “helps us deliver commercial vehicles that keep getting smarter, safer and more valuable long after launch.”
The deal, the first for Alloy Kore, comes before the product’s official market release later this year, said John Wall, president of QNX, in an interview. It’s one of the largest design wins in the history of the Ottawa-based unit, acquired by BlackBerry 16 years ago from car stereo maker Harman International. Mr. Wall said QNX expects to sign one more deal this year.
Market watchers have been keen to see BlackBerry, which announced Alloy Kore at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, prove it could secure orders for a platform the company has said will more than triple the revenues QNX derives per vehicle. CIBC Capital Markets analyst Todd Coupland said in a note this month he expected Alloy Kore contract wins to drive “higher growth and incremental value creation.”
QNX was founded in the 1980s and built the nucleus of powerful operating systems. Its technology was embedded inside Cisco routers, nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems and credit card authorization systems. When BlackBerry bought the company, QNX was making digital infotainment systems for upscale cars, and was tasked with developing the last operating system for the buyer’s doomed smartphone business.
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QNX pivoted away from infotainment in the 2010s over concerns Google’s Android system would dominate that business, as it and Apple had done in smartphones. Instead, a group led by Mr. Wall focused on developing advanced driver-assistance and safety systems for increasingly digitized vehicles. It later responded to requests from big automakers to build a vehicle-wide foundational platform that would underpin the digital cockpit, as well as the instrument clusters and surround-view sensor systems, and support infotainment applications.
That helped establish QNX as BlackBerry’s fastest-growing and most valuable unit, and its technology is now embedded in more than 275 million vehicles. But QNX generates less than US$10 per vehicle made, an amount the company has never disclosed publicly, but which an informed industry source shared with JOBFlocks.
The Globe is not disclosing the identity of the source as they are not authorized to discuss the matter.
In 2018, as automakers began taking more software development in house, Mr. Wall and his team came up with a plan, called Project Green. Their pitch was that QNX could develop a broader platform that could simplify the task of building software-powered vehicles for customers who were relatively inexperienced at managing digital development and implementation. Automakers weren’t interested, Mr. Wall said.
By 2024, automakers were beset by delays launching new vehicles, due in part to issues they had integrating software. One automaker visiting QNX that fall asked if it could develop a more comprehensive platform just like the one the Ottawa unit had proposed six years earlier. Project Green got the green light.
BlackBerry soon found a partner in Stuttgart, Germany-based Vector, which makes application frameworks and middleware, and whose products are often bought by the same customers as QNX. By combining to make one product (BlackBerry pays a minority of revenues from Alloy Kore to Vector), they would save customers time and engineering resources, simplify integration and enable the vehicle makers to use less-expensive chips, said Marc Weber, vice-president of portfolio management software platform with Vector, in a recent interview.
“It’s not like we’ve come up with a whole new concept” by offering a broader software platform, Mr. Wall said. “We’re just saying: ‘We’ll do it for you, we’ll do it way better, we’ll do it cleanly and we’ll take care of all the details.’”