The Pentagon has decided to roll out Android phones and iPhones to its more than 100,000 employees.
It’s a client that, probably just a couple years ago, Research in Motion never in the worst case scenario would have thought it could lose.
What’s interesting is that the story of a giant organization ditching Blackberry in support of a new smartphone platform isn’t truly worthy of making a big headline anymore.
That may have been the case a couple years ago, but these days it seems about as surprising as a company upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 — it’s just the normal thing to do in this smartphone environment.
When it comes to government agencies, though, any kind of switch like this is more significant.
It took many of them a while to feel confident enough to expose their sensitive information to a Blackberry, and while that hasn’t changed product demands most certainly have. RIM simply has not been able to keep up with the new trends in the industry.
Last week, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement also cut its Blackberry deal in exchange for a massive iPhone order. At the time, RIM said, “We have one million government customers in North America alone who depend on BlackBerry, and more than 400,000 government customers worldwide upgraded their devices in the past year. We are committed to the mobility needs of government agencies around the world.”
Unfortunately, at least 150,000 of those may now soon be switching away from Blackberry.
