U.S. Department of Defense Not Dumping BlackBerry

There have been a lot of stories going around this week concerning the fact that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) was going to end its contract with BlackBerry in favor of Apple devices. We even had a breakdown of how the supposed 650,000 devices were distributed. My initial calculation of the breakdown numbers only totally 630,000 was correct. All of these reports appear to be erroneous.

Last night I had an e-mail conversation with Lt. Colonel Damien Pickart. He is an official spokesman with the press desk at the DoD. The following is the statement that the DoD stands behind in terms of what their mobile strategy is;

“I can confirm that we are not 'dumping' BlackBerry as some reporting suggested.The department recently released its mobility strategy and supporting implementation plan, which clarifies we are moving towards a mobile management capability that supports a variety of devices, to include BlackBerry. As clarified in the recent release of our Commercial Mobile Device Implementation Plan, we are working towards establishing a multi-vendor environment in support of the DoD mobility strategy. The Commercial Mobile Device Implementation Plan updates the June 2012 Mobile Strategy with specific objectives and puts the strategy into action. A key objective of the plan is to establish a department-wide mobile enterprise solution that permits the use of the latest commercial technology such as smart phones and tablets, and the development of an enterprise mobile device management capability and application store to support approximately 100,000 multivendor devices by February 2014. DoD currently has more than 600,000 Commercial Mobile Devices in operational and pilot use, including 470,000 Blackberries, 41,000 Apple Operating Systems and 8,700 Android Systems.”

As you can see the DoD is using a combination of devices from various vendors. The 41,000 iOS devices is a far cry from the reported 650,000 on a purchase order yet to be seen. The military uses mobile devices both at home in the Pentagon, as well as, out in the battlefield.

On February 26, 2013, the DoD made available a news release that describes the Commercial Mobile Device Implementation Plan mentioned in Lt. Col. Pickart’s statement.

I contacted Lt. Col. Pickart after we received the following statement from BlackBerry;

“Our work with the U.S. Department of Defense is going well and the U.S. Department of Defense is moving forward with testing of BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 and the new BlackBerry Z10 smartphone. We are currently working with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and anticipate Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIG) and Security Requirement Guide (SRG) approval for the BlackBerry Device Service, BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry PlayBook by early April. BlackBerry was the first to go through the new SRG process by the Defense Department and will be the first to successfully come out of it.”

As best as I can tell, the testing process is still on-going. The DoD is looking into several options that will combine various devices from several platforms. Until the testing is complete, there are no figures as to how many of what devices the DoD plans to purchase.