A digital ecosystem
PROJECT PARTNERS
A digital ecosystem Written by Dale Benton Produced by James Pepper
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Breaking free from BlackBerry, BBM is embarking on a major growth throughout Indonesia, transcending beyond simple instant messaging
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n the modern world, everything is instant. Entertainment continues to find ways to be in the palm of our hands and at our very fingertips - it has to be, we demand it. As the world continues to become more and more digital, consumers demand more and more of their needs to be readily available and hosted in one simple location. Utilities, e-commerce, social media, television, accessible at the push of one button. Instant messaging used to be exactly what it implies, a form of contact that was fast and easy to use. But now, even instant messaging has had to transform, as “chat” is very much the killer application, enabling instant messaging companies to expand into becoming ecosystems, bringing together chat, social, content and commerce. Most will have heard of the likes
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of WeChat in China, LINE in Japan, Kakao Talk in Korea as instant messaging companies that have made this transformation already, but BBM in Indonesia is also one that comes into the fray. Born out of BlackBerry, best known to the general public as the former developer of the BlackBerry brand of smartphones and tablets, has transitioned itself to an enterprise software and services company. As an instant messaging service, BBM was very much a consumer dominated product, but as BlackBerry shifted its focus to enterprise, it no longer fit the parent company’s direction and BlackBerry looked for options to maximise its value going forward. In 2016, Creative Media Works, a division of PT Elang Mahkota Teknologi Tbk (Emtek) – one of Indonesia’s largest media, content and social
Matthew Talbot Matthew Talbot is chief executive officer of BBM. He brings to his role more than 20 years of technology industry leadership, international management, and extensive sales and marketing expertise in mobility and cloud technologies, financial services, telecommunications, and consumer content in both start-up and public company environments. BBM is one of the largest and the world’s first mobile
CEO, BBM
messaging app. Moving beyond Blackberry devices with over 100 million installs on Android, iOS, and Windows, BBM has evolved from a pure messaging application for communication (text and video) to a social ecosystem unifying Chat, Social, Commerce, Services and Ads. On 27 June 2016, Creative Media Works, a division of PT Elang Mahkota Teknologi Tbk. (Emtek, IDX:EMTK) Indonesia’s largest media, content and technology
business - announced a strategic alliance with BlackBerry to accelerate BBM’s research and development in offering new and exciting features, services and content to the global consumer market. Creative Media Works now operates under the BBM banner as a stand-alone consumer focused business with offices in Waterloo, Mississauga, Ottawa, Singapore, Jakarta, UAE and South Africa.
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networking business - announced payments (utility payments, top-ups) a long-term strategic alliance to comics, shopping, travel, career, accelerate consumer BBM’s research sports, transportation, coupons, and development in offering new and subscriptions, beauty, sports and polls. exciting features, services and content This ecosystem, as Talbot notes, is to the global consumer market. all centred around one unifying vision. “BBM is actually 12 years old this “It’s the goal of making sure that year,” says Matthew Talbot, CEO of in a day in the life of a consumer, the Creative Media Works (CMW), the one app that people go to is BBM, company which has the as it can connect all their daily license to operate, services, social experience develop and run and content at their BBM Consumer fingertips,” he says. globally. “For a Since becoming long time, BBM a part of the Emtek was the default Group, BBM Number of global messaging is significantly service, and expanding its market employees everyone remembers presence in Indonesia at BBM having a BlackBerry and across the Middle East email account and using and Africa. Talbot, having worked BBM. Obviously though the market within the mobile technology solution has changed, and with that, we BBM space for more than 20 years, has seen has also had to change to survive.” the transformation of the market and, This new direction has seen BBM more importantly, what customers evolve from a pure messaging are demanding right here, right now. service connecting people to a “Messaging apps are the new social ecosystem, unifying chat, ecosystems. The average consumer social, commerce, content and has over 3.4 messaging applications services such as news, games, video, on their phone, and only uses four to
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“It’s the goal of making sure that in a day in the life of a consumer, the one app that people go to is BBM, as it can connect all their daily services, social experience and content at their fingertips” MATTHEW TALBOT CEO of Creative Media Works
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five apps every day. The application war as such is already won for time in app, and due to the significant cost involved in constantly trying to drive consumers to individual applications, as well as ongoing support costs around development had accelerated this opportunity,” says Talbot. Talbot points to Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014 as a pivotal moment in the changing perception of what a messaging app could and should be. “That was the year when messaging apps surpassed social media apps,” he says. “The reality is, the killer application already exists and it is messaging. The stickiness of messaging presents a real opportunity to integrate more and more content and relevant services, increasing stickiness, increasing time in app, by allowing consumers to access multiple services they do each day via the one app and socially connecting them.” CMW’s core vision is for BBM to be the top one or two messaging applications within its key markets, but as Talbot notes, it’s hard for any messaging service to go from zero to
more than 60mn users. To that end, BBM is focused on expanding and cementing its footprint in markets where it already has a significant holding, such as Indonesia, and parts of the Middle East and Africa. “Messaging is all about scale, and the network and connection effect that it creates,” Talbot says. “We’re continuing to scale from organic growth, while simultaneously becoming stickier by providing more services and more content into the daily lives of our consumers. The key success factor here is about partnering with ‘best of breed’ content and service providers that are local and relevant to our consumers.” This part is key and CMW has partnered with a number of players in Indonesia already, as well as globally. Just to name a few examples of the breadth of BBM’s portfolio, it has successfully incorporated the world’s leading hotel price comparison site HotelsCombined, online e-commerce marketplace Bukalapak, and global transportation technology company Uber to name a few. IT is also working to launch a payment wallet solution
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with the group’s joint venture with Ant Financial called ‘DANA’, which will enable end-to-end payment across the BBM ecosystem of content and services, online and offline payments, as well as person-toperson payments within Indonesia. “We’ve really tried to partner with the best of breed partners and integrate them into BBM,” Talbot says. “That comes back to the opportunity around the scale that we have, which has enabled us to work with partners that are very much aligned with our success.” Creative Media Works, operating as BBM, was established in 2016
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and the following 12 months has seen significant growth for BBM, but there has been one persistent challenge that Talbot has had to contend with, something that he calls the company’s “Achilles heel”. “I can give a speech at a conference, lay out a full presentation on what BBM is and what it stands for and our ambition, and I can guarantee that people will walk away from it and still refer to us as BlackBerry Messenger,” he says. “It’s two-fold really though, because in markets like Indonesia, BlackBerry is such a well-known brand, you have to strike a balance against what has
BBM Messenger Partners with Criteo to Augment Access to Premium Brands and Advertisers in Indonesia Welcome to the #VibrantFuture of Commerce Marketing Since establishing its publisher relationship with Criteo (NASDAQ: CRTO), the commerce marketing leader, in 2016, Creative Media Works, operating as BBM, has expanded its access to premium brands and high-value advertisers, resulting in significant increases in in-app engagement for brands through BBM Messenger. BBM is the largest messaging platform in Indonesia and has more than 60 million monthly active users. Since it was created in August 2005, BBM has evolved from a pure messaging application for text and video communications to online social ecosystem unifying chat, social, commerce and services like bill payments, top-ups, vouchers / coupons, games, comics, news, video, shopping, travel, sport, career and polls. BBM Messenger’s strength lies in its ability to convert app traffic into consumer engagement, thereby enabling eCommerce players with ads within BBM to increase online sales and engagement. BBM leveraged Criteo to accomplish the following: • Efficiently pinpoint or target specific users within BBM Messenger’s user base, by leveraging The Criteo Engine’s ability to understand each consumer’s online browsing and purchasing behaviour. • Optimise BBM Messenger’s ad inventory by allowing premium, high-value advertisers to engage more effectively with BBM Messenger users through personalised and brand-appropriate ads delivered in real-time. “Indonesians spend an average of 5.5 hours a day on apps and the mobile web, with BBM Messenger being one of the top mobile apps when it comes to usage frequency and duration. For brands looking to grow online sales in Indonesia, in-app advertising on BBM Messenger is a massive consumer engagement opportunity. Criteo’s machine learning algorithms intelligently match publishers’ ad inventories with brands’ dynamic ads to achieve the best consumer engagement results. We look forward to continuing to help platforms like BBM Messenger maximise revenue, while helping brands maximise digital ad spending,”
said Dushyant Sapre, Regional Director, Global Supply and Business Development, Asia-Pacific, Criteo. Results from Criteo’s Collaboration with BBM Since becoming a Criteo publisher, BBM has achieved the following results: • 50 percent increase in overall click-through rates on the BBM platform • 50 percent increase in click-through rates for retailrelated ads on the BBM platform • 50 percent increase in BBM’s daily ad revenue “BBM Messenger works with the best-in-breed partners globally, as part of a continuous effort to provide an enriched user experience, while delivering optimal results to brands and advertisers. The partnership with Criteo gives us access to a robust network of premium and high-value advertisers, while increasing our user engagement and click-through rates. In addition, this collaboration allows both teams to collectively explore various ad formats and methods that work best for brands looking to engage mobile consumers in Indonesia,” said Matthew Talbot, CEO of Creative Media Works, the company that operates and runs BBM globally.
Click here to watch how BBM worked with Criteo Creative Media Works now operates under the BBM banner as a stand-alone consumer focused business with teams operating from Waterloo, Mississauga, Ottawa, Singapore, Jakarta, UAE and South Africa. For more information, visit www.bbm.com.
Introducing the Criteo Commerce Marketing Ecosystem: Criteo, the leader in commerce marketing, is building the highest performing and open commerce marketing ecosystem to drive profits and sales for retailers and brands. 2,700 Criteo team members partner with 16,000 customers and thousands of publishers across the globe to deliver performance at scale by connecting shoppers to the things they need and love. Designed for commerce, Criteo Commerce Marketing Ecosystem sees over $550 billion in annual commerce sales data. For more information, please visit www.criteo.com or email APACMarketing@criteo.com.
come before and what messages move to the cloud promises significant and brand image we want to build improvements in performance as well around the new BBM in the future.” as the ability to launch and scale more In light of branching off into its and more services and content. own venture and company culture, As part of the migration, Emtek CMW is working very closely with will be rationalising BBM’s existing BlackBerry as the company is infrastructure by leveraging on GCP still completing the migration of custom Virtual Machine (VM) types infrastructure and processes from across all of BBM’s components. operating under BlackBerry umbrella. Google Cloud’s presence over the This migration brings map and ability for software about its own unique load balancers to be challenges for Talbot, globally reachable The year as it doesn’t synergise allows BBM to that BBM was with the agile centralise its established environment that infrastructure in BBM is now trying select regions, but still to operate within. provide a low latency, “We are still hosting user experience for its our infrastructure within global subscriber base, as the BlackBerry data centres network traffic will be ingested in Canada, and we’re only halfway in the geographically closest Google through the transitioning process,” Point-of-Presence and traverse he says. “Without control of our their backbone to BBM servers. infrastructure end-to-end, it’s like trying “Google Cloud Connect is a service to steer a boat without a rudder.” offering, which will allow us to connect Part of the transition to a new our Google Cloud infrastructure infrastructure has been its deal with in Singapore and Taiwan to the Google to run on the Google Cloud BlackBerry data centres that are Platform (GCP) in Southeast Asia. This located in North America,” says Talbot.
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BBM migration stats As part of the migration, Emtek will be rationalizing the infrastructure by leveraging on GCP custom VM types across all the BBM components:
CORE MESSAGING
BBM ON BLACKBERRY INFRASTRUCTURE
BBM ON GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM
~5,000 instances
~3,500 instances (with autoscaling)
~500 instances MEDIA STORAGE
NetApp Filers
Migrate to pay per use on GCS
Solid State Disk over FusionIO LOGGING AND MONITORING
~5,000 instances
Migrate PubSub and Dataflow
BIG DATA AND ANALYTICS
~1,000 instances
Migrate to Dataproc and BigQuery
DATABASES
~500 instances
Leverage Cloud SQL
The hardware footprint in the Google Cloud, which spans multiple permutations allows BBM to spin up beefy virtual machines, previously only achievable on bare metal nodes; for example, a 64 vCPU node with 240GB of RAM. This allows for vertical scaling, reducing BBM’s node count footprint and operational overhead.
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“This network circuit will ride on top of Google’s Wide Area Network and subsequently interconnect with BlackBerry infrastructure over dedicated fibre optics - this allows us to be in control of our own destiny and limit any impact from other ‘network hungry’ Google customers.” GCP became available in Singapore just this year, which has allowed CMW to host its BBM platform in “our own backyard”, making it easy to deliver services to the company’s largest user base in Indonesia.
“We are excited to be able to deploy into the GCP Singapore region, as it will allow us to offer our services closer to our largest customer base,” says Talbot. “Coupled with Google’s global load balancers and extensive global network, we expect to be able to provide a low latency, high-speed experience for our users globally.” Such a significant project, one that will see enormous quantities of data and data storage be migrated to a new platform, is not without its risks and Talbot is targeting a Q1 2018
launch date, which will provide enough time for the company to complete its full migration of infrastructure, processes, data and systems. Operating in the mobile consumer business, one that continuously transforms and evolves at an increasing rate, Talbot is all too aware of the importance for BBM to remain at the forefront of this change in order to survive. For BBM, the company today handles between 15,000- 20,000 customer service requests on a
weekly basis, with 6,000 app reviews and approximately 2,000 comments and social engagements. This allows CMW to gain a true picture of understanding what the customers are looking for as a service solution. “We have such a huge number of touchpoints with the customer on a daily basis where they tell us exactly what it is they don’t like and don’t think works, but more importantly what they do like and what does work,” says Talbot. “The moment you start thinking
“There’s a tremendous opportunity for CMW to expand the BBM application into something that adds value to people’s daily lives, but we have to execute on that vision, and make sure that we take this opportunity and build something special” MATTHEW TALBOT
CEO of Creative Media Works
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you’re doing something right, that’s when you stop pushing yourself. It’s important to hear what’s going wrong and not tell people what you think is going right.” As CMW continues this migration, partnering with more and more key providers in the market, the company’s immediate goal is to completely free itself of its BlackBerry heritage and truly establish itself as a new entity, and become one of the leading digital ecosystems in Indonesia. For Talbot, he sees BBM becoming more than a simple ecosystem but a
part of consumers’ everyday lives. “We have between 50 and 55mn monthly active users at any given month in Indonesia, so we can have a huge impact on the day-to-day activities via BBM,” he says. “There’s a tremendous opportunity for CMW to expand the BBM application into something that adds value to people’s daily lives, but we have to execute on that vision, and make sure that we take this opportunity and build something special.”
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www.bbm.com