PETALING JAYA: BlackBerry Ltd believes Malaysia can move beyond manufacturing hardware to building intelligent machines and platforms as it bets on developing the country’s embedded software talent.
The Canadian software company said the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in vehicles, factories, medical devices, and industrial automation is shifting value creation beyond hardware to the software that enables machines to operate safely, securely, and in real time.
“As we move forward, it’s no longer hardware and software.
“It is hardware and software coming together, and this is where systems integration becomes very important,” BlackBerry vice-president of QNX Engineering and head of research and development for Asia-Pacific Rajkumar Jain told StarBiz.
He said Malaysia’s strong manufacturing, semiconductor, and electronics ecosystem provides a solid foundation to move into systems engineering and system architecture by combining hardware expertise with embedded software capabilities.
“My analogy is that existing hardware manufacturing is the body.
“By learning embedded software, you’re bringing the brains. When you have the brain and the body both in Malaysia, you move from making parts to making intelligent machines and platforms,” he said.
To help build that talent pipeline, BlackBerry has partnered with Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), making it the first university in Asean to join the company’s QNX Everywhere programme.
Under the initiative, BlackBerry will train university lecturers, who will then teach students using the same commercial-grade QNX Software Development Platform (SDP) 8.0 used by customers across the automotive, medical, industrial and other safety-critical sectors.
Jain said the company expects to train hundreds of Malaysian students in the programme’s first year, with UKM potentially becoming a regional training hub for other universities across Asean.
“We’re really looking to create the next generation of talented embedded systems engineers,” he said.
The QNX Everywhere programme was launched globally in 2024 after BlackBerry made its QNX operating system (OS) available free for non-commercial use.
Previously, organisations had to purchase licences to access the software.
Jain said students and universities now receive the same software platform, training materials and development tools used by commercial customers.
“The whole purpose of the QNX Everywhere programme is to give everyone access to an industry-grade foundational operating system to build the next generation of software-defined embedded systems,” he said.
The initiative has already been introduced at more than 125 universities in India over the past 15 months, with about 400 lecturers certified and thousands of students trained.
QNX is BlackBerry’s real-time OS designed for safety-critical applications where reliability and predictable response times are essential.
The software serves as the foundational layer between hardware and applications, enabling systems to process data, execute tasks and make decisions within milliseconds.
Jain said this capability is becoming increasingly important as AI moves beyond cloud-based applications into physical systems.
“Today you have sensors and actuators generating enormous amounts of data.
“AI processes that data and makes decisions, but those decisions often have to happen in milliseconds or even microseconds. That’s where the QNX OS brings real-time performance, safety and security.”
“The OS is pre-certified to meet major functional safety and cybersecurity standards across industries, allowing companies to focus on developing applications without having to build compliance from scratch.
This gives organisations the confidence that they are adopting technology with security built in from the beginning and certified at the highest level,” he said.
Applications include advanced driver assistance systems, autonomous driving features, industrial robots and surgical equipment, where even a brief delay could have serious consequences.
“In a medical surgical robot, even a 10-millisecond or -microsecond delay could be catastrophic. Reliability is no longer optional. The margin for error is essentially zero.”
