I've been asked that question a couple of times lately. I'm indebted to Ben Creevy, ICT Manager of Theiss Business Services in Brisbane and a Board member of Aussie user group ATUG, for the analysis below:
"Here at Thiess we have been doing our comparisons between the two products towards providing a standard within the business that ICT can support. In doing this exercise we have determined that the Blackberry platform offers a much stronger value proposition for our corporate users than the iPhone. However, we still anticipate that a small handful of executives will use the iPhone and as such we will support this as a secondary, albeit smaller platform.
Our argument for the Blackberry is based on some of the following reasons:
1. Far greater control and security of end devices through the use of the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES).
a. This allows for an SOE-like governance over users control of the device and applications. (We can lock down SMS, MMS, WAP etc…for various users)
b. We can securely control the device itself, and encrypt the micro-sd cards and the content on them.
c. We can erase a device if it is lost or stolen.
2. Better email push from our MS Exchange cluster and control around calendar synch to Outlook.
3. MMS capability that the iPhone doesn’t have.
4. Copy & paste functionality within emails. (Again, the iPhone doesn’t have this feature and for corporate users, this is a must have feature)
5. BES controlled back-up of the device. If a unit is lost or stolen, when a new unit is issued we can simply restore the entire user settings from the BES.
They’re just some of the drivers for us at Thiess. I hope this helps?