Just wait till they realize the loss of productivity from people downloading games and fart apps to their work phone :D

I'm also not sure how getting rid of their BES will help save that much money? BES is also important for security purposes, and they will still need an Exchange box or two, unless they plan to migrate to Gmail :D

If the office is already on an Exchange server the move would take the BES out of the picture and more closely integrate the whole system. I can believe that that would save some money. Also, relating back to the subject of the thread, one thing that the iPhone does do very nicely is syncing, whether you are on a PC (Outlook) or a Mac (iCal), it keeps true to the Apple motto of it just works.

Cutting the BES out of the picture will save alot of money there is no question about it.

The company can wipe and sell the servers or use them for exchange durring a future expansion. It will also save a lot of time for the companies IT staff. There is a lot of work in maintaining a server both in terms of man hours and in terms of unit and electricity costs. I know of places that had to get new a/c and power wired to their server room because what was there couldn't handel it. For the price they paid the organization could have bought a lot of iPhones. Not to mention the fact that they can now sell their BES licenses which can cost upto $100 per user.

All that said, iPhones are not BlackBerries and as a person who has use both, do not belong in the workplace. The RD put into the biz part of the phone like email or contacts on the iPhone is a far second from that of the BlackBerry. The lack of a physical keyboard makes it very difficult to type messages.

Also as ScottC mentions fart applications will interupt meetings ect.

Actually their IT looked at migrating the company to Gmail, about 12,000 total users who have email accounts. There was a trial for a while, but in the end decided to move to Exchange, from Lotus Notes. I also don't believe they will save that much money, but it's not my place to question it especially since I favor the move for my own reasons.

I don't know about lost productivity. I would think people are professional enough to not be distracted by the cruft.

From what I've seen it appears RIM has been standing still and let this happen. One of the things that I think closed the deal was the ability for the iPhone to run all the company's web based apps without modification, where the BB failed totally. It probably helped that I designed a lot of these applications and informally tested on my iPhone for the last few years as we were developing them for the chance that something like this would happen.

There is basically little to no Mac support, though I haven't really kept up since I replaced my BB with the first iPhone.

Hardly a surprise for an org of that size.
I'd be more worried about the lower level of integration with Exchange than the fart applications.

And I'm curious what "failed totally" on the BBs. Were they configured to emulate BB or IE for the user agent? Are the sites particularly heavy in client-side scripting or other such technologies? My experience with the more current BB OS versions is that the browser is rather capable. The fact that you designed them for one platform not withstanding, of course. Hopefully your decision to push them that way won't cost them too much in the long term.