Qantas Airways, one of the biggest Airline companies in Australia, recently disclosed that they are ditching RIM's Blackberry over Apple's iPhone for their employees. Qantas Airways also revealed that they have selected Microsoft Office 365 platform over Google for their upcoming hybrid cloud computing environment.

Apple's iPhone vs. RIM's Blackberry

The decision to choose Apple's iPhone over RIM's Blackberry was a result of a staff survey in Qantas Airlines. The survery results revealed that more Qantas employees are in favor of utilzing iPhones instead of Blackberry devices. This led to the the company's decision to replace over 1,300 company-issued Blackberrys. This move would be able to help the company in saving about AU$1.4 million. Qantas also released a statement addressing this decision saying that it is part of the firm's "broader mobility strategy". Qantas also added that "savings will come from simplifying the infrastructure supporting the devices, from the devices themselves and from the data agreements reached with our providers."

Qantas also announced that they would be giving out at least 2,000 iPad to their pilots in order to decrease the amount of printed paper from 18,000 pages to 3000. This move would mean around AU$1.5 million savings annually.

This decision by Qantas is a big blow for RIM as it is already struggling to hold a bigger marketshare for mobile phones. According to reports, RIM's Australian market share has dropped significantly from 9% last 2009 to only 0.1% for this month. There is also a big difference as compared to other competitors in the field like Google's Android (56.9%) and Apple (30.5%).

Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google

Qantas also made another decision to choose Microsoft Office 365 for their hybrid clould computing environment instead of Google's offering. Paul Jones, the Chief Information Officer for Qantas, justified their decision stating that MS Office 365 was an "ideal platform" for the firm's large mobile workforce. Jones also mentioned that "We've signed a new deal with Microsoft for the 365 platform to provide the next set of collaboration tools, including email and SharePoint. We went through an evaluation and decided that the 365 product met our needs going forward". Qantas is already in the process of changing from Lotus Notes to MS Exchange/Outlook. Presently, over 19,000 Qantas employees are already utilizing Outlook out of their 30,000 employees.

The contract between Qantas Airways and Microsoft was sealed during the second quarter for an undisclosed amount.