News

BlackBerry's QNX Tech Now Available to Embedded Devs in the Cloud

• By John K. Waters
• November 28, 2022

BlackBerry announced today that it is extending its use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make its QNX technology available to mission-critical embedded systems developers in the cloud.

The company made the announcement at the AWS re:Invent 2022 conference, underway this week in Las Vegas, and demonstrated its artificial intelligence (AI) data platform, BlackBerry IVY, running natively on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. The demonstration focused on how developers will be able to leverage the cloud to streamline the development, testing, and integration of automotive AI-driven solutions that can then be deployed to run in-vehicle on automotive-grade hardware. 

QNX is a software platform designed for embedded systems and their long lifecycles. It comprises the QNX Neutrino real-time operating system (RTOS) for ARM and x86 platforms, the QNX Momentics tool suite, and the QNX Software Center. BlackBerry IVY is a cloud connected automotive AI platform co-developed by BlackBerry and AWS.

The QNX RTOS running in the cloud functions as a cloud-native developer workbench that can be used independently or in conjunction with BlackBerry IVY, the company says. It includes two networking stacks: a Standard Networking stack to support basic networking requirements and a High-Performance Networking stack to support complex networking. "Its comprehensive POSIX-compliant development environment will be familiar to anyone who’s worked with Linux," the company says.

BlackBerry is billing the extended cloud capabilities to embedded systems developers in a range of industries, including automotive, robotics, medical devices, industrial controls, aerospace, and defense, among others.

Providing these capabilities in the cloud for the first time will help embedded systems developers accelerate collaboration and velocity across the entire product development and deployment lifecycle, said Grant Courville, vice president of product management and strategy at BlackBerry QNX, in a statement.

"Arming our customers with our foundational QNX software products in the cloud is a game changer for embedded developers as they will have easy access and scale available at their fingertips,” said he said.

Once a leading mobile phone provider, Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry now leverages AI and machine learning to deliver solutions in cybersecurity, safety, and data privacy solutions. The company says it currently secures more than 500 million endpoints. including more than 215 million vehicles.