BlackBerry Enterprise Defections Expected to Climb: Report

According to a research report from analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), more than 30 percent of Research in Motion (RIM) BlackBerry users in large enterprises (those with more than 10,000 employees) expect to migrate to a different platform within the next year.

The report noted this represents a "significant reduction from the platform’s current domination of the large enterprise market space," with 52 percent of mobile device users in that demographic actively using a BlackBerry device as part of their job function.

Based on EMA’s research results, the reason for the mass abandonment of BlackBerry devices is primarily due to a lack of user satisfaction. In fact, only 16 percent of respondents to EMA’s survey indicated they were completely satisfied with their BlackBerry smartphone versus 44 percent of Apple iPhone users. Increasingly, employees are utilizing their own mobile devices for business purposes, so end user satisfaction is proportionally growing as a critical adoption consideration, the report noted.

"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 managing research director. "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."

RIM ushered in the first broad enterprise adoption of mobile devices with the introduction of the BlackBerry in 2003.

For the research, two separate surveys were performed one focused on end users requirement and experiences and the other designed to report on how enterprise IT managers are supporting the devices. Combined together, the survey results provide a cross-section of enterprise mobile device usage, trends, challenges and best practices across a range of business sizes and industry types.

For more, read the eWeek article: BlackBerry Market Share Declining: Report.