RIM’s global BlackBerry outage, which began on October 10, happened at just about the worst time – right on the verge of Apple’s new iPhone 4S release (October 14) and a new iOS 5 update.
In fact, though, RIM’s been in trouble for months now, since well before the outage sent stocks tumbling and the Internet freaking out over lost BBM and email services. That’s at least the conclusion of a new study from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), which finds that 30 percent of BlackBerry users in large enterprises (10,000 or more employees) are planning on switching to a new device platform in the next year.
“We expected to see some market share loss by RIM, but these results were far more dramatic than we could have anticipated,” said Steve Brasen, EMA’s managing research director, Network World reported. “Both enterprises and employees indicated they were broadly abandoning BlackBerry devices for primarily Android and iOS platforms, and this data was collected before the recent BlackBerry service failures, which can be expected to even further accelerate migration.”
Currently, RIM commands a striking lead among large enterprise employees: Some 52 percent reported they used BlackBerry smartphones, compared to 20 percent who used smartphones running Google’s Android OS and 17 percent who said they used Apple iPhones.
But that lead is rapidly eroding because BlackBerry users aren’t satisfied with their phones. Only 16 percent reported being “completely satisfied,” according to EMA, compared to 44 percent of iPhone users.
BlackBerry continued to lead the way in medium-sized businesses (between 500 and 10,000 employees), but it’s dominance has shrunk to 36 percent, closely followed by iPhone at 27 percent and Android phones at 23 percent. Meanwhile, RIM’s lead among employees of small businesses (under 500 employees) has completely evaporated, with Android achieving the top spot with 43 percent compared to iPhone’s 27 percent second-place spot and BlackBerry’s 16 percent third-place finish.
As EMA’s Steve Brasen, the author of the study, explains:
Large enterprises continue to be dominated by BlackBerry devices, with more than half of end users from organizations with greater than 10,000 employees reporting their use of this platform. The reasons for this are primarily legacy issues. Many large enterprises adopted BlackBerry devices and the BES environment at a time when this was really the only viable platform for distributing emails to mobile phones. Today, these devices are still heavily in use; however, as the data below confirms, this trend appears to be changing.
Small businesses are primarily supported by Android and iPhone devices that extend their popularity into the mid-market. Android is particularly strong in smaller organizations due to the relatively low cost of the devices. Since the Android platform is available on a variety of different physical devices offered by a host of different manufacturers, competition in the marketplace drives down overall prices of Android devices and encourages the availability of some lower-cost smartphone options.
Perhaps even more intriguing are the results broken down by type of industry. RIM BlackBerry still dominates in government, healthcare and high tech industries. iPhone dominates in education, no surprise given Apple’s longstanding commitment to that market, but also, oddly, in manufacturing. Android dominates in telecommunications and consulting. As Brasen writes:
It is not surprising that financial, government, retail, and high technology companies showed broad adoption for BlackBerry devices as these typically large organizations were most likely to deploy the platform when it was the dominant enterprise option. Government institutions in particular have very broadly distributed BlackBerry smartphones as their platform of choice with more than three quarters of respondents in that field reporting using one (of course, it doesn’t hurt that even the President of the United States has been widely publicized as owning a BlackBerry).
EMA surveyed 348 employees via phone (irony!) on two separate occasions to obtain the results. While not necessarily a representative survey of all 95.8 million smartphone users, the trend clearly doesn’t bode well for RIM.
Then again, this is but the latest survey to indicate that BlackBerry owners are on the verge of switching over to another platform, and yet BlackBerry managed to ship a record 52.3 million units in 2011 according to the company’s fourth quarter earnings results. And BlackBerry is hoping to stem the bleeding by finally introducing a brand new OS, BBX, which was unveiled on Tuesday at RIM’s developer conference in San Francisco.
So RIM has some fight it in yet. The question is whether it’ll be enough to turn the tide.
