Several years ago, Blackberry was the only way to get reasonably secure email on remote devices. Lots of companies standardised on that, and have kept going because it's the easy option and it still works.

It's been possible to get mail/calendar/etc on other devices for a while (and even for devices owned by your employees rather than purchase by you). But if your directors are all using Blackberries then it can be hard to justify the migration cost, especially for small/medium companies or places that are particularly conservative.

But when it looks like Blackberry might not be around for much longer, all that changes. Articles like this are the sign of (another) tipping point for RIM.

[ I'm a sysadmin at a small Blackberry-only company. Two managers sent me this article today and asked what we were doing ]

“Large enterprises don’t want to be locked in with a single vendor anymore,” yet flocking to Apple...

It boggles the mind. Five years ago, RIMM was king of the hill.

Though Apple don't provide a corporate mobile email service, so there isn't the same kind of lock-in in this case, right?

No but Apple going out of business (what they fear of Blackberry, even if unlikely short term) would hinder their ability to deploy software, which is pretty bad too.

I would say Apple going out of business is unlikely long term! By the way: In-house developed apps are not depending on Apples App store.

http://www.apple.com/business/accelerator/

  I would say Apple going out of business is
  unlikely long term!

This is true. Apple has reached a Microsoft level, where it would take an act of god for the business to completely go under at this point. If it does go out of business, it will be gradually over the course of many years.

But they do depend on Apple's signing of the app before installation on the phone, right?

For development, Apple signs a certificate that lets you sign your own binaries, plus a provisioning profile that the phone uses to determine if it can run the app.

Presumably for the corporate version, they just give you a certificate you can use to sign, and one that you put on company phones so they're willing to run your software.

A lot of what's going on here is the time spent investigating what works, deciding what to support and documenting everything. That might not be literally "lock-in", but there's always a significant cost to move.

Given the amount of companies running Exchange, Apple is an inviting solution.

I would argue that these companies are pretty much locked into a Microsoft e-mail solution.

Yet most large enterprises are "locked in" to exchange, or worse lotus notes for email. If they've learned they hopefully learned to not depend on one phone vendor/platform and provide the ability for say, android, windows phone, bb, and ios devices to get to company resources.

Is Microsoft trying to capitalize on RIM's recent stumblings? It seems rather obvious that they should be beating down the door of these enterprise customers to push WP devices into the mix.

I'm hazarding a guess, but a great many enterprises must be running Exchange. Vertical integration or what?

almost all enterprise companies use exchange. The thing is though that iphone and android have supported exchange for a while, there really isn't much reason to go to the windows phone just to get push email.

Microsoft probably has the most experience with supporting enterprise customers. Apple is largely consumer-oriented and Google is something else entirely. They might match each other on features, but that's not all businesses look for.

Could this be the perfect point for MS to convert existing RIM customers to Windows phones? I understand what you're saying but from a business perspective I was wondering if MS taking over RIM makes any sense at all

Can't they just use Gmail?