WATERLOO, Ontario (AP) — BlackBerry has appointed Marty Beard, the former chief executive of LiveOps, Inc. as its new chief operating officer.

Beard starts immediately and will be responsible for such things as marketing, BlackBerry 10 app development and customer care and quality.

He was chairman and CEO of LiveOps, a provider of cloud applications for customer services.

The chief operating officer job has been vacant since November 2013 when Kristian Tear left the company in a restructuring that also saw the departure Frank Boulben, the company’s chief marketing officer.

BlackBerry Ltd., formerly known as Research In Motion, was once Canada’s most valuable company, with a market value of $83 billion in June 2008. But the stock plummeted as BlackBerry was hammered by competition from the iPhone and Android-based phones.

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