Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry Ltd. (BBRY) appointed Marty Beard as its chief operating officer on Monday, filling a position that had been vacant since a management shake-up last November.
Beard was most recently chairman and CEO of LiveOps, a cloud-based contact center provider. Prior to that he worked at Sybase, which is also where current BlackBerry chief executive officer John Chen was once the CEO. At Sybase, which is now owned by SAP AG (SAP), he was president of Sybase 365 (a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc), a mobile messaging and mobile commerce services unit, and held a series of executive positions including SVP of Marketing. Beard also worked at Oracle Corp. (ORCL) as VP of Oracle Online, its e-Commerce service unit.
“BlackBerry continues to attract top talent to the company. Marty brings extensive experience in operations, marketing and serving customers through the best technologies and processes available,” Mr. Chen said in a statement.
In the new position, Beard will be responsible for marketing, development of applications based on the BlackBerry 10 operating system, customer care and quality. He will also be responsible for instituting best practices and processes.
BlackBerry hasn’t had anyone in the chief operation position since former BlackBerry COO Kristian Tear left the company late last year, shortly after Chen took the reins.
Mr. Beard’s appointment is effective immediately.
BlackBerry shares are down 6 cents, or 0.50%, today, trading at $9.99 as of 1:36 p.m. EDT.
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