OK, execs. You want Apple kit. And Windows Phone, too? Really?

A “circle of despair” is causing CIOs to abandon BlackBerry, it's reported.

The head IT honchos of Blighty's union Unite, and the Formula 1 team and sports car producer Caterham, said the cost of the devices and issues with BlackBerry's mobe management tool, BES10, had been a contributory factors to the switch.

The financial woes of the Canadian handset manufacturers are well publicised and Paul Mease, head of IT at Unite, told the mag this fact had not escaped his notice. Mease said that cost had been the major driver for the change for the union and it expected to see savings of between 30 and 40 per cent.

Both Unite and Caterham F1 have now switched their staffers over to to iPhones, according to a Computing Magazine report. UK-based but Malyasian-owned Caterham chose Apple over Android because of security and device fragmentation concerns, it said. Caterham apparently trialled BlackBerry's Z10 and Q10 but felt that BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 wasn’t as good as its MDM rivals and claimed to have had reliability problems with the Z10.

Caterham’s head of IT, Bill Peters, did however leave the door open for Windows Phone. As a sponsor for Mercedes, BlackBerry does, after all, sponsor one of Caterham’s major rivals.

The view that Android is the least secure is shared with a number of security experts, particularly since there is a problem managing security and mobile device management.

Samsung however would no doubt argue that the security fears are unfounded as the company’s Knox containerisation solution has just been given clearance for use by British government workers. ®