BlackBerry’s QNX division gets $40M boost from federal government

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 essential 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,” John Wall, head of the QNX division, said.

“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.