Apple snags some of RIM's enterprise sales team

If there was much doubt about Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) plans for a greater share of the mobile enterprise space, it’s reinforcing quite the opposite with a spate of hires on the sales side. After doing some digging, Dow Jones found that at least five members of Research In Motion Ltd.’s (RIMM) enterprise sales team have been poached by the iPhone maker in the past 18 months.
The BlackBerry maker has been facing increased pressure on its bread and butter for years now and it has lost some big enterprise customers recently.
It’s hard to gauge whether or not the hires were high level enough to negatively impact RIM as much as they served to bolster Apple’s push into the corporate market. The respective top executives at Apple and RIM have been taking public digs at each other almost ever since the iPhone came onto the scene.
During Apple’s last earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer said 80% of the Fortune 500 companies are either deploying or testing the iPhone. And while the iPad is being tested or deployed in at least 65 of the Fortune 100 companies, BlackBerry is hoping to gain some ground in the tablet space with its forthcoming Playbook that will introduce an entirely new operating system and developer platform that it acquired through QNX Software Systems.