Troubled smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry may have just officially formed a committee to explore a sale of its assets last month, but the company's board is apparently eager to offload it to a willing buyer as soon as possible. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, BlackBerry's board of directors wants to hold a fast auction, with the goal of selling the company by November of this year.

The report cites anonymous sources that claim that BlackBerry has had preliminary talks with potential suitors willing to buy all or part of the company, and it has whittled down its list in preparation for a sales process due to begin soon. Though nothing is yet guaranteed in terms of a sale, BlackBerry's board allegedly wants this process to go down sooner rather than later. Bert Nordberg, the former Sony Ericsson executive now a member of BlackBerry's board, has said that the company should sell off pieces of itself and become a "niche" player. It was earlier reported that BlackBerry is interested in spinning off its BlackBerry Messenger service into a separate company.

This week's announcement of Microsoft's intention to purchase Nokia's phone division will likely only stoke the fires under BlackBerry's board members to close a deal as soon as possible. Microsoft claims that talks between it and Nokia began as recently as this February, and terms were agreed upon only six months later. BlackBerry would need to make things happen twice as fast as that to meet its alleged goal for a November sale. But that begs the question, if BlackBerry's own board has such a lack of faith in the company that it wants a sale to happen as fast as possible, what's to say that there are any buyers out there that really have faith it will succeed?