BlackBerry CEO: 'I Believe We Can Succeed'

BlackBerry (BBRY) interim CEO John Chen last week released another open letter to assure enterprise customers that the company is “strong financially, technologically savvy and is well-positioned for the future.” He failed, again, to mention how BlackBerry will work with channel partners in 2014.

In his letter, Chen continued to stress the importance of surrounding himself with “a talented team of industry leaders,” noting that he will add to his “leadership team with those who have the skills and passion to get BlackBerry back on the path to profitability.”

Chen said his team needed to move to a new operating unit structure to place more emphasis on  what he called core business drivers. He then went on the offensive, calling out BlackBerry’s competitors in the mobile device management (MDM) space.

“With a global enterprise customer base exceeding 80,000, we have three times the number of customers compared to Good, AirWatch and MobileIron combined,” he said. “This makes BlackBerry the leader in mobile device management.”

Chen said BlackBerry’s customers include those who have the most stringent security needs.

“For governments, BlackBerry cannot just be replaced. We are the only MDM provider to obtain Authority to Operate on U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) networks,” he said. “This means the DoD is allowed to use only BlackBerry. Across the globe, seven out of seven of the G7 governments are also BlackBerry customers.”

He ended his letter by citing the company’s success with BBM, the company’s messaging service, and teasing new capabilities and cloud services for QNX that will be unveiled in January. But again, the letter didn’t mention channel partners.

Chen did not mention channel partners in his first open letter to enterprise customers either, which aimed to “set the record straight” on BlackBerry’s commitment to BYOD and MDM.

It’s true that Chen’s past two open letters were geared toward enterprise customers, not channel partners, so maybe that’s why channel partners were not mentioned in either of his letters. If this was the case, however, should channel partners expect to receive an open letter from Chen in the near future?