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SAP: We just can't gobble BlackBerry. We're stuffed with 'mobile solutions'

Says mobe-maker just won't 'fit'

Business-software giant SAP has ruled out buying struggling handset-maker BlackBerry.

Chief financial officer Werner Brandt is reported to have said that BlackBerry wouldn't be a good fit.

“Blackberry doesn’t fit with our [company’s] strategy,” Brandt is reported to have told Euro am Sonntag.

He pointed to the fact SAP already has mobile offerings and claimed the company doesn’t have any gaps in its portfolio to fill as a result.

The news come after The Wall St Journal reported that a posse of BlackBerry execs had landed at Facebook HQ in California last week to talk buyout.

It’s not clear whether the ads social network giant expressed an interest in doing business.

Google and Cisco are also reported to have been in talks for full or partial purchase of the Canadian handset-maker.

SAP and Cisco on the business side, and Facebook and Google at the social side, represent either end of the spectrum on mobile adoption. This highlights the conundrum BlackBerry has failed to reconcile with its handset in the manner that Apple has done with the iPhone and Samsung has done with its Android-powered Galaxy.

As the world’s largest maker of business software and an enterprise network provider respectively, SAP and Cisco would be decent homes for BlackBerry – especially considering the company’s huge number of users in suits.

On the other, though, it’s the consumer audience targeted by Facebook and Google – which then bleed into the workplace by way of BYOD – that tech companies are so desperate to win.

On the latter, it’s Blackberry’s Messenger (BBM) that’s thought of as one of the company’s most prized assets. It is BBM that the yoof smartphone market has gravitated towards, and those are the consumers you'll see punching at the keys of a BlackBerry on the train to and from work with the commuting masses.

It was BBM that was – in part – blamed for allowing angry youngsters to assemble and coordinate their moves against police during the London riots of 2012. Using BBM from within BlackBerry's BES enterprise solution, meanwhile, gives the user end-to-end encryption, surely an attractive prospect.

Could its secure nature be the very thing that makes BlackBerry the natural choice for execs, too? SAP, at least, appears to think not. ®

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