BlackBerry India has appointed Sunil Lalvani as Managing Director for India, reports DNA. He will be replacing Sunil Dutt who quit the company in March 2013. Lalvani will be responsible for overseeing and driving the overall business strategy and growth for BlackBerry in India. Lalvani has been with the company since 2009 managing enterprise sales in India. Prior to joining BlackBerry, he has worked with Cisco, Nokia, SITA-Equant and Global Telesystems in networking and telecom sales to enterprise customers in India. Lalvani takes over the position at the time when BlackBerry has been struggling to stay relevant in the Indian market. It had recently launched the touchscreen Z10 based on BlackBerry 10 Operating System. However the company needs to launch more affordable handsets in the country. BlackBerry 10 based Q10 which comes with a physical QWERTY keyboard is supposed to on sale soon. Besides this, BlackBerry has also struggled with the Indian Government. In February 2013, a government panel recommended that BlackBerry should provide access to PIN details of all its handsets across the globe, in order to allow Indian Intelligence agencies in the country to track messages sent between Indian subscribers and Foreign subscribers. BlackBerry had also set up a server in Mumbai, India in February 2012, to provide security agencies access to its BlackBerry Messenger services, after a long-drawn battle with the Indian authorities. Before this, the Ministry of Communications had mentioned in December 2011, that the Indian security agencies were able to access BlackBerry services through the interception and monitoring facilities provided by the telecom service provider.
