Read the pro and con, vote, and comment
Visitors to our site are chosing RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones over Apple’s iPhone as the enterprise standard by a 2-to-1 margin in our TechDebate poll.
The debate itself features Brian C. Reed, CMO and VP Products, BoxTone, for the BlackBerry, and Chuck Goldman, CEO, Apperian, for the iPhone. Click on the link to read, cast your own vote, and opine.
You can also check out the tweetstream for #teamblackberry and #teamiphone, which has long since been elevated to the level of vituperation and invective.
Most of what I’ve read and seen still gives BlackBerry the lion’s share, by far, of the enterprise market. Both RIM and Microsoft offer extensive server-based management and security infrastructures that promise IT-controlled security and management. RIM just announced that BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 now supports Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, for example.
By contrast, Apple doesn’t bother with any of that: instead, it piggybacks on widely accepted corporate standards, such as Cisco’s VPN client and especially Microsoft Exchange, coupled with the Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility 2.0, to support the minimum management and security requirements for enterprise customers. Infoworld did a great assessment of the 3.0 operating system release in terms of administrative control.
And apparently, that’s more than enough to win over a growing number of IT departments. The rate and scale of iPhone adoption in the enterprise is astounding, fueled by the security and management enhancements in the 3.0 firmware. In July 2009, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said 20 of the Fortune 100 companies had placed orders of over 10,000 unitsm and some government agencies, another BlackBerry stronghold, are deploying over 25,000.
