Two more significant RIM customers have decided to move on from the troubled Canadian company, this time both in US government.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency has said they will be switching all their 18,000 employees over to iPhones from BlackBerrys, ending the Agency’s eight year relationship with the BlackBerry maker. It will cost $4.1 million to make the transition. Representatives from ICE stated, “[RIM] can no longer meet the mobile needs of the agency.” “The iPhone services will allow these individuals to leverage reliable, mobile technology on a secure and manageable platform in furtherance of the agency’s mission.”
Another government agency, the National Transportation Safety Board, has also just revealed that they plan on dropping RIM. The NTSB’s reasoning for the decision is that their agency “requires effective, reliable and stable communication capabilities to carry-out its primary investigative mission and to ensure employee safety in remote locations.”
BlackBerry’s vice-president of government solutions gave a response to the recent decisions: “Of course, we are disappointed by this decision. We are working hard to make our new mobile computing platform, BlackBerry 10, meets the future needs of government customers.”
While BlackBerry 10 may succeed at addressing various problems that business users have with the product, it likely won’t be able to bring back the swarms of customers that they’ve begun to lose. And with an expected release date of early 2013 for the new OS, RIM may continue to sink until a point where they can’t swim anymore.
