Halliburton to Switch Entire Company From BlackBerry to iOS This Year

Halliburton, based out of Houston, Texas, is one of the largest energy services companies in the world. It has operations in more than 70 countries and employs over 60,000 people.

Given that information, you can see why it’s such a big deal that the company has recently announced its intentions to ditch RIM’s BlackBerry platform in favor of the iPhone and iOS…

AppleInsider has learned that Halliburton plans to phase out thousands of employee BlackBerrys in favor of Apple’s popular handset. The news comes from an internal company newsletter that was sent out earlier this month.

“Over the next year, we will begin expanding the use of our mobile technology by transitioning from the BlackBerry (RIM) platform that we currently use to smartphone technology via the iPhone…”

…The move comes after “significant research” into both Apple’s mobile platform and Google’s Android operating system led Halliburton to “determine that the iOS platform offered the best capabilities, controls and security for application development.”

RIM, who at one time dominated the market, has seen much of its enterprise business slip away over the past 12 months. Many companies, like Halliburton, have dropped their BlackBerry devices for ones running Apple’s iOS.

With a new CEO at the helm, it’ll be interesting to see if RIM can make any kind of comeback. But one thing is for sure, it can’t afford to lose many more big name clients.