Major bank in the UK allows employees to switch from BlackBerry to iPhone

19th May, 2010 by adina
Tags: , , , , ,

Research in Motion has been seriously affected after the decision of the British bank Standard Chartered said its employees could switch from the BlackBerry to the iPhone. The bank’s e-mail system has been converted worldwide and will cover the iPhone service fees of anyone who would need a smartphone for work. Company representatives did not say how soon this transition would take place or how many of the 75,000 staff of the bank are equipped with smartphones.

The move is one of the largest corporate expansions of the iPhone and shows the intention to diversify away from the exclusive use of BlackBerry at work. Many companies that use BlackBerry have homogenous networks because they base their e-mail services on RIM’s signature push service, which drives messages to phones in real-time. The iPhone can provide push mail through Exchange and other services. It was however excluded from workplaces through support concerns.

The iPhone has most of all suffered due to security problems, as it provides only light protection compared to the BlackBerry and even lacked protection completely in certain zones, especially third-party applications and VPNs. Another objection of the companies was that they had to manage applications through iTunes servers. These issues, or part of them, should be completely fixed in iPhone 4.0. More advanced hardware encryption is also expected.

Companies have been under pressure simultaneously from end users wanting an iPhone and unintentionally from Research in Motion itself. Although the problems have settled down, there were periodical outages of the BlackBerry services disabling e-mail or other services, especially for individual users. Corporate customers, who have usually been immune to this kind of problems, can see, from time to time, a ripple effect through part of their users.


  • Share

 

Readers Comments