“Today we spoke with a top sales executive from a major wireless carrier, as well as several sources close to the smartphone enterprise market,” Rory Maher reports for The Business Insider. “Our sources say three primary drivers are causing Blackberry enterprise clients to switch to the iPhone.”
Cost: For a company with about 1,000 employees it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to manage and maintain the Blackberry service annually. This is because experienced, sophisticated IT people are needed to manage and maintain the Blackberry enterprise servers and updates or this function is outsourced to a third-party vendor. iPhones, on the other hand, are less resource-intensive, and Apple’s active sync can handle most of of the service remotely through Apple. “Tens of thousands of dollars” may not seem like much to a big company, but even the biggest companies are cutting any costs they can these days. The wireless sales exec says one client switched all 400 employees from Blackberry to iPhone for this reason.
International Access: A major Japanese client with offices in America moved from the Blackberry to the iPhone because iPhones work seamlessly in Japan and Korea as well as the United States. Only the Blackberry Bold offers seamless integration when travelling in those countries. We’re told all new Blackberry releases will have the necessary number of bands to enable seamless integration with Japan and Korea so this will become less of an issue over time.
Web Surfing: Internet surfing is less of a differentiator at this stage but more clients have been discussing it in recent months, which indicates this is a growing preference. We believe Apple marketing for the iPhone and the general buzz around the product from a consumer perspective has largely driven demand for this at the enterprise level from the bottom up (i.e. employees asking for them from their IT departments).
Maher reports, “Still, while interest in the iPhone at the enterprise level has been building our sources say this is proving to be a very gradual process with moves only happening in the past six months.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Beowulf" for the heads up.]
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