I am curious as to how many corporate BlackBerry users out there had to buy their own device? I know of many organizations that rely heavily on the ability of their mobile workforce to receive email and take calls while on the road, however, these very organizations don’t supply the hardware to their users that makes this possible. At least not directly anyway.
It seems like there are a lot of organizations that have BlackBerry Enterprise Servers in place, but, don’t actually provide BlackBerry devices to their mobile workforce. Instead, the employee that wants to hook up to the BES must buy their own BlackBerry. In many cases, the monthly service charges, and sometimes even the hardware costs are reimbursed, however, the employee is responsible for acquiring their own mobile device.
Up until recently, there really weren’t any reliable alternatives to using the BlackBerry for pushed based email, however, that tune has changed a bit over the passed year or so. The organizations that require employees to purchase their own equipment seem to be a bit quicker to adopt methods of delivering email to devices other than BlackBerries. My guess is that employees that have to buy their own devices want to buy the devices that they want, which, by the way, aren’t always BlackBerries. Additionally, some of these other BlackBerry-like devices are less expensive to support than BlackBerries so financially, it makes sense to offer more choices.
At our company, that is the company policy – the employee is responsible for the device and the associated voice & data rate plans with the carrier.
Now anyone who is told that they can get a BB, is reimbursed to some extent – depending on department I think – so the cost to have a BB is reduced a bit for the employee.
I’d rather have the ability to choose my device and provider than to have corporate dictate what I get.
Everyone gets a Blackberry, but we all have to use a corporate agreement with Tmobile for Blackberry cell/data. Tmobile is very agressive with corporate accounts/rates. We never see a bill, which is kinda nice.
At my employeer, all BlackBerrys are corporate owned. No personal BlackBerrys are allowed.