BlackBerry QNX division receives $40M boost

TORONTO• The federal government will provide a $40 million grant to help BlackBerry Ltd. develop new software for the vehicles of the future, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Friday.

Trudeau was at BlackBerry’s QNX division in Ottawa alongside CEO John Chen for the announcement, touting the 800 jobs expected to be created at the company’s Ottawa campus.

But BlackBerry is hoping that the project will have a bigger impact than that: It wants to become the essen- tial software platform for future connected cars, something on which an entire ecosystem of applications could eventually be based.

QNX software is already in the infotainment systems of more than 120 million cars, including brands like Toyota, Audi, Jaguar and Ford.

While there are numerous other simple systems embedded in cars, most are currently independent of each other.

“In today’s vehicle you have up to hundreds of electronic control units (ECUs), and they’re all separate. So for instance if you have automatic braking in your vehicle, that’s an ECU.… If you have automatic door locks, that’s an ECU,” said John Wall, head of the QNX division.

“The car of the future is going to be a consolidation of these functions on what we call a high-performance compute platform.”

BlackBerry sees itself as ideally positioned to build this platform, because QNX is already in millions of cars, and because the company has a strong reputation for efficient, reliable, secure software.

“The best analogy I can make is, think of the smartphone. Way back when, Blackberry had their ecosystem, Apple had their ecosystem, Nokia had their ecosystem. Eventually it collapsed down to Android and iOS,” he said.

BlackBerry currently employs about 2,000 people across Canada, and the $40 million grant from the government is expected to create the new jobs over 10 years.

In addition to the government money, BlackBerry is committing to invest $310.5 million in the vehicle software development project, and at Friday’s announcement, both Chen and Trudeau talked about the apprenticeship opportunities which will train more people for technology jobs.

BlackBerry also committed to spending $ 5 million on partnerships with academic, private- sector and government organizations on cybersecurity work, as part of the overall project.

Playing off their reputation for reliability and security, BlackBerry also recently announced a smart cities certificate system which aims to create a trusted way for connected cars, traffic lights and other urban infrastructure to communicate.

The idea of building an operating system for the car also ties in with the future of autonomous vehicles — something QNX is also testing, and something that Trudeau mentioned at Friday’s announcement.

“The cars of the future are bound to be not only autonomous but connected to one and other, communicating between them to make our roads safer. For a global leader like QNX, this represents an unprecedented opportunity for growth,” Trudeau said.

“The race for the top spot in the new economy has already begun, and if we want to see Canadians take the lead, we need to have their backs.”

THE RACE FOR THE TOP SPOT IN THE NEW ECONOMY HAS ... BEGUN.