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Changewave shows that iPhone has opportunity in the enterprise

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Rated +27
249 Votes

Changewave today came out with some very interesting business smartphone data. The first bit of information is that RIM's Blackberry is the dominating platform with nearly three quarters (73%) of the respondents smartphones.

Now the latest ChangeWave numbers are in on the corporate side of the smart phone ledger, and once again the clear momentum winner is RIM.

As part of a February 11-15 corporate survey, ChangeWave asked respondents involved with IT spending decisions who the manufacturer was of the smart phones their company currently provides.

Nearly three-in-four respondents (73%) cited Research In Motion as the manufacturer of their company’s smart phone.

The Blackberry's market dominance is well known.  The survey starts to get more interesting in the customer satisfaction arena...

While Apple (AAPL) still has a relatively small share of the corporate smart phone market (5%), the company’s iPhone continues to grab sky-high satisfaction ratings. Nearly three-in-five (59%) of Apple’s business customers say their company is very satisfied with the iPhone.

RIM ranks second with a very satisfied rating of 47%, though we note this represents an unusually large 8-pt decline from the previous survey.

The decline of RIM's satisfaction ratings is likely due to its continued outages. Despite the outages, RIM is gaining or holding marketshare. With double digit leads in very satisfied ratings, it would appear that Apple is ready to pounce on the enterprise market. Samsung and Motorola (and partially Palm), representing the Windows Mobile Market, bring up the rear with 10-30% very satisfied.

This information is important now because Apple is getting set to deliver some iPhone enterprise connectivity advancements with its SDK announcement on March 6th.

Even with high satisfaction ratings, the enterprise fight won't be an easy one for Apple. Changewave notes that Apple's marketshare results aren't entirely steady but surprisingly, it is already the number two business smartphone manufacturer in planned purchases. Apple just recently started allowing AT&T business account members to purchase the iPhone through their business portal.

Looking ahead to the 2nd Quarter, RIM (77%) is the dominant leader in planned corporate smart phone buying – having jumped 3-pts since our previous survey in November. Apple (11%) is second, down 3-pts from its previous high.

The other manufacturers are also down vs. market-leading RIM. 

Palm (8%), Motorola (7%) and Samsung (4%) have each experienced a 2-pt decline in terms of planned purchases, with each company registering its lowest level of the past year.

The real question is: Will Apple be able to make a dent in RIM's seemingly insurmountable lead?

Those questions will begin to be answered on March 6th.

What People Are Saying

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Rated -4
214 Votes

www.BlackberrytoiPhone.com

Traffic statistics at http://www.blackberrytoiphone.com confirm the high interest in converting from the Blackberry. BTW, how could Microsoft have ever let RIM steal the mobile business communications market like they did?? Instead Microsoft wasted time and money trying to steal marketshare from Apple's iPod market. Pathetic.

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Rated +9
217 Votes

Microoft dropping the ball

I agree with Anon. And we see how successful at grabbing marketshare within the portable mp3 player market.

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234 Votes

Wake-up call for RIM

RIMs lead has nothing to do with the product itself, but rather the lack of products from competitors.

Over the past few years, if a company wanted to roll out enterprize e-mail to their people, the choices were very limited... it was either RIMs Blackberry Enterprise Server, or some cobbled together multi-vendor solution.

Now with Apple's rumored entry into the enterprise (Let's see what March 6th brings), RIM needs to step it up a notch to keep it's lead.

RIMs strength has been it's easy to use e-mail services, and it's keyboard. Both of these advantages allowed them to capture the lions share of enterprise messaging market.

However, today more and more companies are looking for solutions that make use of more than just messaging. They want to extend the reach of their corporate applications to their mobile workers. This means that Apple may have an advantage with it's Web 2.0 compliant browser.

A clear winner in comparison to RIMs browser, Apple's iPhone Safari browser allows the corporation to truly extend many of their internal web apps to their employees.

With the upcoming release of Apple's software development kit, they will allow developers to build native applications. I would assume that some of those developers will be corporate developers as well as commercial off-the-shelf developers. RIM does already offer an SDK, and while it's been available for a long time, very few commercial applications exist for it.

A lot of the success that Apple stands to garner in the enterprise market will hinge on the message during next weeks announcements. They'll need a few heavy hitter commercial applications developers to show support for the platform, they'll need a few major corporations to show support, and they'll need a near bullet-proof strategy for their SDK environment.

Some open questions that I'd have for Apple would be:

1) Security. Will the device support things like remote wipe, VPN access, and remote device administration?

2) SDK. Will the SDK allow corporate development and software distribution, including advanced software signing for high security applications?

3) Enterprise messaging. Will Apple's enterprise messaging strategy be able to surmount RIMs advantage of BES and keyboard?

As I mentioned earlier, Apples browser is hands down a winner compared to RIMs, but is that enough to win in the enterprise?

As a wake-up call to RIM, they need to invest in building a device with a much better browser (near impossible task since Apple has set the bar so high), one that can allow the enterprise to extend the investment they've made in Web2.0 applications.