Case Study: Emirates Group achieves rapid mobile app adoption and operational agility with BlackBerry

Emirates Group accelerates user adoption with multiple BlackBerry applications

Emirates Group, a global leader in aviation and travel, needed to give thousands of highly mobile employees—especially 12,000 cabin crew, dispatchers and frequent-traveling managers—secure, real-time access to corporate systems. The business challenge was to mobilise many desktop services quickly and cost-effectively; a traditional top-down development approach would have been too slow to meet urgent operational needs.

Emirates’ IT division Mercator launched a community-driven programme using the BlackBerry platform, providing a common platform, APIs and a private app catalogue so business owners and in-house developers could rapidly build and distribute apps. The initiative produced apps such as FABS, TOM, ERP Lite, iCrew and Dispatcher, and delivered fast adoption: over 1,500 BlackBerry downloads, a standby app downloaded hundreds of times within hours, and 30+ apps in development—creating a secure, scalable mobile ecosystem that improved operational responsiveness.

Emirates Group

Sanjay Sharma

Head of Mobile Development