BBM Meetings to be available ‘this year,’ will have voice and video conferencing options

BlackBerry has been pushing BBM in a few directions over the last year, namely to consumers on Android, iOS and Windows Phone. BBM has also seen expansion in the form of BBM Money, along with a focus in the enterprise market with BBM Protected, which is the company’s first eBBM Suite product.

The popular messaging service now has over 91 million active users and BBM Meetings was briefly talked about during a conference call last June. A presentation slide stated, “BBM Meetings empowers employees to be more collaborative and productive anytime, anywhere from their mobile device.” Originally slated for September, BBM Meetings has resurfaced though an interview with John Sims, BlackBerry’s President for Global Enterprise Solutions, who says the plan to release BBM Meetings with voice and video is still coming “this year,” but first to its enterprise customers.

Sims said, “We will [also] soon be launching something called BBM Meetings. It is a service that allows voice and video conferences for groups of about 25 people. It will initially be launched as an enterprise service this year and we will also expand it to the consumer market sometime next year […] It will have a presence on BlackBerry devices, iOS and Android. It will be on tablets and we will also have a desktop version.”

There was no indication of how BBM Meetings will integrate with BlackBerry Blend, nor if there will be an additional cast to your company. However, it seems that BlackBerry will be heading towards taking on industry heavyweights such as Skype, GoToMeeting and WebEx.

[source] Jakarta Post [/source][via] N4BB [/via]