EXCLUSIVE VIDEO INTERVIEW: Enterprises are “reassured” by the fact that BlackBerry has refocused on what has traditionally been its core customer base, following a prolonged period of uncertainty about the future of the troubled mobility player, John Sims, president of Global Enterprise Services for the company, told Mobile World Live.

“It’s been very important for us to establish a strong dialogue with our customers as we have been going through some of the changes we’ve had going on in the company. But I think they are reassured by the fact that we have re-committed the company towards the enterprise space which of course was the core of the company to start,” he said.

At Mobile World Congress this year, the company announced BlackBerry Enterprise Service 12, a new version of its enterprise mobility tools which brings together management of new devices – powered by BlackBerry 10 as well as competing platforms – with legacy BlackBerry devices.

It has also announced free migration to BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, with a new pricing structure which the company said “enables customers to simplify their enterprise mobility management to a single trusted provider.”

Sims said: “When we first started as company, we could be ‘all-BlackBerry’ within a customer, but we recognise there are transitions happening as people need not only the end-to-end security provided by BlackBerry, but they also need to support BYOD, as an example, in their enterprises. And we’ve changed. We are showing our customers that we can satisfy their needs across the broad range of requirements they might have.”

Serving companies in “the regulated industries, so things like healthcare and financial services”, will be core to BlackBerry’s evolution, the executive said, noting that “the company’s heritage is built around security.”

And this extends to a new, enterprise-focused version of its BBM messaging service, which has recently come under Sims’ remit.

“BBM has been hugely successful, I think we’re up to over 85 million monthly active users on BBM, so it’s been growing quite nicely. But when you look at that base of users, what we noticed was about 25 million or so of those end users are actually enterprise users already, they are using it in the enterprise for various reasons. As we talk to customers, they said: ‘we need that to be as regulated as some of the other communications that happen within our company’,” he said.

Watch the full interview here.