Silent Circle has unveiled a new ‘enterprise privacy ecosystem’ that it describes as the “world’s first.” The company, known for its encrypted, privacy-focused Blackphone product, made the announcement at Mobile World Congress 2015.
A panel of senior Silent Circle officials told the assembled press in Barcelona that the enterprise solution would include two new hardware products, Blackphone 2 and the Blackphone+ tablet, and also new apps and software.
“Enterprise privacy is the collective privacy of all the individuals in the enterprise,” said Phil Zimmerman, Silent Circle co-founder and PGP guru. “Personal privacy has become an enterprise issue.
He added, regarding the string of major breaches that have lit up the headlines in the last year: “You couldn’t write fiction that was more catastrophic than some of the things we’ve seen.”
The new software unveiled by the company includes PrivatOS, Silent Suite and Silent Meeting. The latter is a conference call solution for tablets that Mike Janke, the company’s co-founder and chairman described as “challenging the $20bn conference call industry.”
The software, with its visual interface, does away with traditional conference call features such as dial-in codes.
Jon Callas, Silent Circle’s CTO and former Apple man said of Silent Meeting: “The users don’t have to sweat the security. It uses our tech, our network. The calls are encrypted – this is true if you have it on a Blackphone tablet, an Android tablet or an iOS tablet. You don’t have to ask who just called in, you don’t have all of the annoyances you would have in normal audio conferencing.”
Meanwhile, the newest version of the company’s PrivatOS Android-based mobile operating system includes new functionality, dubbed Spaces, which offers virtualization controls enabling the separation of one OS into different ‘containers’, so that work, private and family strands can be separated out.
“You get in effect separate phones on one phone,” said Callas. “It’s a virtualization system that allows you to have multiple phones that all run separately.”
The company made its objective very clear at MWC, as it sets out its stall in an attempt to differentiate itself from other smartphone providers with its privacy-centric USP.
“You will not see curved screens. You will not see selfie sticks,” joked Janke. “Our focus is security and privacy.”
He added: “We take it very seriously – people’s lives area actually in danger. Never before have private citizens in the world been under such barrage from governments hacking away at our privacy. Never has businesses’ intellectual property been under such assault as it has today.”
Entrust man Bill Conner, now president and CEO of Silent Circle, warned the enterprise landscape that, “Your business brand is about trust. The cost of that trust as a brand value now has a dollar figure.”
The company’s Blackphone products are built on the ZRTP mobile architecture. Zimmerman described Blackphone’s technology, “A protocol that doesn’t rely on a public key infrastructure. We don’t rely on a top-down centralized trust model, like with certificate authorities.”
Blackphone 2 will be available this July, Silent Circle said, with the Blackphone+ tablet following in the fall.