BlackBerry Ltd. said Monday that it will stop operating its BES enterprise servers in Pakistan as of Dec. 30 due to the insistence of the Pakistani government that it get "unfettered access" to communications on the servers. A blog post by Marty Beard, BlackBerry's chief operating officer, initially said BES servers in Pakistan would shut down on Monday. It was later updated to say the shutdown has been delayed until Dec. 30 as a result of Pakistan extending a "shutdown order" until that date. The blog said the country's telecommunications authority in July told mobile operators that the BES servers have to stop operating "for security reasons." "The truth is that the Pakistani government wanted the ability to monitor all BlackBerry Enterprise...
BlackBerry Ltd. on Monday said it has made Marty Beard its new chief operating officer. The company said in a press release Beard was most recently chairman and CEO of LiveOps Inc., a maker of cloud-based applications for customer service. Prior to that, he was president of Sybase 365, the mobile messaging and mobile commerce unit of Sybase Inc. Beard's LinkedIn profile shows he worked in different positions at Sybase between 2000 and 2011. That would have placed him there for much of the time BlackBerry CEO John Chen was chairman and CEO of Sybase, between 1998 and 2012, according to a bio of Chen on Forbes' website. Beard fills a position vacated in November by Kristian Tear. It was unclear if Beard would be moving to BlackBerry's headquarters in Waterloo, Ont., or remain in San Francisco, where his LinkedIn profile...