Clorox Ditches BlackBerry For iPhone And Android

BlackBerry's place as the business smartphone of choice is slipping fast with the onslaught of apps and functionalities that rival iOS and Android platforms have to offer. The Clorox Company announced in a speech at the SNW conference yesterday that they are dropping the BlackBerry as their company phone and letting employees choose between iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 devices.

The winning option was Apple, with 92 percent of staff choosing the iPhone, six percent Android, and two percent Windows Phone 7. Apple's iPad is also being tested among staff, although it has yet to become the winning choice over conventional notebooks.

"Employee satisfaction with the IT team was not great" said Ralph Loura about when he first took over as Clorox CIO a year ago. At the time, the company was standardized on Windows 2000 desktop computers and BlackBerry mobile phones. "If you believe demographic studies, the workforce in their 20s and 30s isn't going to accept black corporate PCs with black corporate mobile phones and not be allowed to run Facebook or Angry Bird apps."

Beyond shifting to new devices, the company is also ramping up usage of cloud computing. Loura believes that eventually workflows can be transformed such that staff can use tablets instead of notebooks to run business apps from the cloud.

RIM's BlackBerry was once dominant at the enterprise level thanks to its emphasis on security and data encryption. However, it seems its lack of apps, web browser deficiencies, and weak "cool" factor may see it lose more and more market share as iOS and Android ramp up data security.

[via Electronista]