Recovering enterprise mobility player BlackBerry announced its acquisition of Movirtu, a company which provides technology for operators that enables multiple phone numbers to be active on a single device.

BlackBerry said that this improves device management in bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and “corporate owned, personally-enabled” (COPE) environments.

Movirtu’s virtual SIM platform enables both a business number and a personal number to be used on a single mobile device, with separate billing for voice, data and messaging usage on each number.

This enables staff to switch between business and personal profiles easily without carrying multiple devices or SIM cards.

While multi-SIM support is becoming more common in a number of smartphones, it is far from the norm – especially in high-end devices targeting businesses.

BlackBerry said that deploying the Movirtu system alongside BlackBerry Enterprise Service will enable enterprise customers to apply IT policies to the business number, without impacting the usability of the device for personal use.

“The acquisition of Movirtu complements our core strategy of providing additional value added services, and it will leverage our key assets, including our BES platform, along with our existing global infrastructure which is connected to a large number of mobile operators around the world,” said John Chen, executive chairman and CEO of BlackBerry.

Carsten Brinkschulte, head of Movirtu, also noted that with BlackBerry’s network operating centres already connected to operators worldwide, “leveraging these existing connections would be the best way to offer quick and reliable deployment of the Movirtu Virtual SIM solution with minimal effort for the operator”.

The newly-acquired technology is said to complement BlackBerry’s Secure Work Space, BlackBerry Balance and other partitioning technologies, to enable users to separate work and private data on the same device.

Terms of the deal were not announced.