Federal agency to switch to iPhone, drop BlackBerry
(Reuters) - The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) said will end its contract with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion in favor of Apple's iPhone, dealing a fresh blow to RIM just months ahead of its launch of a vital new device.
Context & Ripple Effects
ICE is the latest and most visible federal defection in a pattern that has been building all year: Politico reported in February that more agencies were ditching BlackBerrys, and Halliburton announced its own corporate transition to Apple's iOS the same month. The timing stings for Research In Motion because it lands just months before the launch of the new device RIM is counting on to arrest its decline.
The arc runs back further still — an Ars Technica survey found as early as March 2010 that 40% of BlackBerry users were willing to trade in for an iPhone, and Reuters reported in January 2011 on a BlackBerry program meant to help RIM defend exactly this government turf. RIM's own hiring of iOS app developers in March 2012 signaled how far the center of gravity had shifted. The story traveled unusually wide on pickup day, syndicated across eight outlets including TechCrunch, ZDNet, AllThingsD, and Ars Technica.
First-order effects
- RIM loses a named federal agency contract outright, removing recurring government revenue and a marquee security credential from its books just ahead of the new device launch it needs to succeed.
- Apple gains a law-enforcement-scale customer whose adoption validates the iPhone for high-security deployments, strengthening its position in the federal procurement pipeline.
Second-order effects
- Other agencies weighing renewals now have a precedent to cite, pressuring RIM to compete on price or concessions to hold remaining government accounts rather than assume loyalty.
- Enterprise IT vendors and carriers serving Washington face re-platforming demand — device management, app provisioning, and support contracts shift toward iOS ecosystems, echoing the Halliburton-style corporate transitions already underway.
Third-order effects
- If agency-by-agency defections continue, government mobility moves structurally from a single-vendor secure-hardware model to consumer devices wrapped in management software, eroding the moat RIM built its business on.
- RIM's survival case narrows to whether its upcoming platform can win back both federal buyers and the developer ecosystem — a bar raised by every account lost before launch day.
The trend: Government and enterprise mobility is migrating from BlackBerry's locked-down hardware franchise to iPhone-based fleets, with each public agency defection accelerating the reassessment of RIM's security advantage.