BlackBerry today began the rollout of its first eBBM suite product, which tailors its BBM instant messaging service to enterprise users. Today marks the debut of BBM Protected, FIPS 140-2 cryptographic library-enabled messaging, between users within the same enterprise, or between organizations who also use BBM Protected, for secure and confidential communications.

Who cares about this? Specifically, companies or organizations working in regulated environments, like defense contractors, for instance. In other words, this is BlackBerry trying to shore up its beachhead, and appeal to the big governmental customers (and others including law firms that work in regulated environments) who have continued to form the bedrock of its customer base even as consumers fly to other platforms including Android and iOS.

BlackBerry’s BBM Protected rollout is starting “ahead of schedule” according to the company, and currently work with BB OS 6.0 or later, or BlackBerry 10 running on REgulated mode. It’ll hit BlackBerry 10 devices running BlackBerry Balance to switch between work and play later this fall, and should arrive on iOS and Android devices later this year, too.