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.