The BlackBerry maker RIM executive Scott Totzke told Bloomberg Businessweek that its share of the US government market “is probably increasing,” and that it sold 400,000 devices to federal agencies in the past year. RIM’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2012 saw a 19 percent drop in revenue totalling $125 million, and a 21 percent drop in shipments from Q3, and the company has recently seen the departure of a string of high-level executives.
“Compared to the enterprise over the last year and a half or so, the federal business on whole is up,” said Totzke, who also runs RIM’s U.S. government sales business. “The employee base is shrinking, so if we’re looking at a market with fewer employees and our install base is stable to slightly up, that would seem to indicate that we have an increasing market share.”
“We need to help customers understand what is possible” with the devices, said Totzke, who joined Waterloo, Ontario- based RIM in 2001. RIM sold 400,000 devices to the U.S. federal government in the past year as it won more business and existing clients upgraded to the newer BlackBerry 7 devices introduced in August and added BlackBerry servers, he said. About 40 percent of RIM’s government customers upgraded to new devices in the past 12 months, he said.
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