BlackBerry, once a doyen of the mobile phone world, has continued its transformation into a "billion-dollar cybersecurity firm", as it announced the completion of its acquisition of California-based AI and cybersecurity Cylance.
The integrated company will be known as BlackBerry Cylance and will be led by Cylance CEO and founder Stuart McClure. According to BlackBerry, McClure will "continue to apply his visionary math-based approach to threat detection, prevention and response", as he leads a team of engineers and data scientists delivering products and services to more than 4,000 companies.
BlackBerry executive chairman and CEO John Chen said: "Today BlackBerry took a giant step forward toward our goal of being the world's largest and most trusted AI-cybersecurity company.
"Securing endpoints and the data that flows between them is absolutely critical in today's hyperconnected world. By adding Cylance's technology to our arsenal of cybersecurity solutions we will help enterprises intelligently connect, protect and build secure endpoints that users can trust."
The acquisition of Cylance has been seen as a strategic addition by BlackBerry for its end-to-end secure communications portfolio, with Cylance's ML and AI technology set to be embeddable within BlackBerry's products, including IoT communications platform BlackBerry Spark.
