BlackBerry phones losing out to iPhone and Android

Enterprise users, who have long been RIM's firewall against the iPhone and Android devices, are increasingly jumping ship.

A new survey released by Enterprise Management Associates found that 30% of BlackBerry users in enterprises of 10,000 employees or more plan to switch to a different platform over the next year. EMA says this will lead to a significant reduction of RIM's market share in large enterprises, which currently stands at 52%.

"We expected to see some market share loss by RIM, but these results were far more dramatic than we could have anticipated," says Steve Brasen, EMA's 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."

EMA says that lack of user satisfaction is the key reason that users want to move away from BlackBerry devices, as only 16% of BlackBerry enterprise users said they were "completely satisfied" with their devices. By contrast, 44% of iPhone users said they were completely satisfied with their phones.

RIM's market share in the overall smartphone industry has been steadily declining over the past two years. Nielsen reported last month that BlackBerry devices account for only 18% of all smartphones used by US subscribers, well behind the market share of Android devices (43%) and the iPhone (28%).

Last week, the company was hit by an embarrassing four day service outage that occurred when a dual-redundant, dual-capacity core switch failed and its backup switch failed to activate. The company has since offered its customers free premium apps to make up for the outage.