What ultimately wins in the enterprise, the Blackberry or the iPhone?

Network World - The Blackberry has been the smartphone of choice in the enterprise for some time, and for good reason. It mastered the most important business app, e-mail, and comes with all the controls IT requires. But enter the iPhone, stage right. A slick device that everyone craves and the dev world is smothering with new apps. So the question is, what ultimately wins in the enterprise? Arguing for the the BlackBerry: Brian Reed, CMO and VP Products, BoxTone, and on the iPhone side Chuck Goldman, CEO Apperian.

What do you think?

It takes a village of third-party vendors to catch the BlackBerry

By Brian Reed, CMO and VP Products at BoxTone

With about 36 million BlackBerry devices in use globally, half of which are enterprise-connected, BlackBerry has about a 17 million to 18 million device lead on the iPhone in the enterprise. Hundreds of organizations around the world have 5,000 or more BlackBerry devices, and a few run more than 50,000. In the past decade, BlackBerry has set the standard for enterprise-grade, reliable and secure mobility.

Sounds like we have the winner -- already.

With that said, customers still want choice, and that means the enterprise mobility door is open just enough for other players to push through and perhaps gain share. But if the well worn history of enterprise technology adoption is any indication, winning on a global scale isn't a walk in the park, and typically requires three things: Meet the needs of the enterprise IT organization; meet the needs of the enterprise user; be easy to do business with.

So to see why BlackBerry is the ultimate winner in the enterprise, let's take a closer look at where each stands in these categories.

Let's start with the IT organizations that care about architecture, security, scalability and manageability, and that have so heartily embraced the BlackBerry platform. They value the ability of the BlackBerry platform's closed-loop system to reliably and securely enable mobility in an inherently unpredictable mobile world of roaming devices.

They value the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), not only because it securely and reliably routes data, but because it provides seamlessly integrated advanced mobile device management to give IT comprehensive control via 420+ IT policies, over the air (OTA) application push and security control, and enterprise application white-list/black-list control. And they value the RIM network operations center and its worldwide network of BlackBerry Relays, which provide near bullet-proof security, message queuing with guaranteed delivery, massive scalability and high availability approaching "five nines."

Right now, much of what enterprise IT values in BlackBerry is missing from the iPhone with or without a third-party technology like Microsoft ActiveSync. No native VPN. No native Mobile Device Management (MDM). No private on-premise secure OTA App push. Only 30 or so IT policies with ActiveSync (of which iPhone implements 13). Limited on-device encryption.