According to a report from Bloomberg, it seems that Ford will soon be ditching their BlackBerry devices by the end of the year. In its place, the car manufacturing company will be equipping their employees with Apple’s iPhone instead. The first wave will see about 3,300 BlackBerry handsets replaced by iPhones.
Ford is also expected to provide an additional 6,000 iPhones to its employees over the course of the next couple of years, meaning that BlackBerry could potentially lose about 10,000 customers over the next few years. According to Sara Tatchio, a Ford spokeswoman, “We are going to get everyone on iPhones. It meets the overall needs of the employees because it is able to serve both our business needs in a secure way and the needs we have in our personal lives with a single device.”
While Apple’s iPhones have never really been viewed as an enterprise device, the Cupertino company’s partnership with IBM has suggested that Apple will be doubling their efforts at pushing iOS into the enterprise market, and we reckon that Ford’s choice to replace BlackBerry devices with iPhones is a step in that direction.