More feds ditch BlackBerrys
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is planning to start the process of ditching Research in Motion's signature BlackBerry wireless phone largely in favor of the iPhone, the agency's top tech official told POLITICO.
Context & Ripple Effects
Research in Motion's government franchise — long the market competitors could not crack because of its security certifications — is showing its first visible cracks. Three weeks after Halliburton announced its corporate transition from BlackBerrys to Apple's iOS, the ATF's top technology official told POLITICO the agency plans to phase out its BlackBerry fleet largely in favor of the iPhone, making this the first named federal defection of the cycle.
The move lands on top of confirmed signs of weakness across RIM's business: BlackBerry 7 sales sputtered after an initially strong launch, and the company is squeezed between Apple and Android's Ice Cream Sandwich while unconfirmed leaked roadmaps promise a BlackBerry 10 rescue that has not yet shipped. The story traveled unusually widely for a single-agency procurement note — The Verge, The Guardian, TUAW and 9to5Mac all picked it up — which says less about ATF than about how closely each RIM loss is now being read as a leading indicator.
First-order effects
- RIM loses a marquee federal customer: the ATF will run procurement toward the iPhone, directly cutting BlackBerry device volumes and the associated BES support contracts at one agency.
- Apple gains a reference deployment in the most security-sensitive buyer category — a federal law-enforcement agency — that it can show other agencies evaluating their own fleets.
Second-order effects
- Other agencies watching the ATF's security review now have an internal precedent to point to, lowering the institutional barrier for parallel defections across the federal fleet.
- Enterprise mobile-device-management vendors shift attention to iOS-in-government deployments, competing to supply the compliance and device-control layer that BlackBerry's own infrastructure previously provided by default.
Third-order effects
- If agency-by-agency defections continue, RIM's structural moat — government and enterprise accounts locked in through certified infrastructure rather than consumer preference — erodes into ordinary platform competition where it is already losing ground to Apple and Android.
- Government smartphone procurement could reorganize around device-plus-MDM stacks rather than any single vendor's end-to-end system, permanently weakening the incumbent advantage BlackBerry built its public-sector business on.
The trend: Consumer-driven iPhone adoption is climbing the trust ladder from corporate fleets like Halliburton's into the government agencies that were Research in Motion's last defensible stronghold.