BlackBerry appoints Marty Beard as COO

BlackBerry has named Marty Beard as Chief Operating Officer, effective immediately. As the new COO, Beard is responsible for cross functional organisations, including marketing, BlackBerry 10 application development, customer care and quality.

Most recently, Beard was chairman and CEO of LiveOps, a provider of cloud applications for customer service. Prior to joining LiveOps, Beard was president of Sybase 365, a mobile messaging and mobile commerce services unit, and held a series of executive positions including SVP of marketing. Prior to Sybase, Beard worked at Oracle as VP of Oracle Online, its e-Commerce service unit. In his role at Oracle, he was responsible for leveraging the web to improve customer sales and support.

He replaces Kristian Tear, who left last year shortly after John Chen took over as CEO.