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Research In Motion ceded the consumer smartphone market to Apple and Google years ago, and soon it will cede business market as well. New research from IDC indicates that enterprise — perhaps the last stronghold of RIM’s once great BlackBerry empire — is increasingly switching to iPhone and Android and suggests the BlackBerry’s days as the business world’s smartphone of choice may soon be over.

“Apple iOS devices are being brought into the enterprise in droves, both by corporate and by employee purchase,” IDC explained. “In fact, [we believe] that by the end of 2012, iOS will be the number 1 corporate-liable operating system (OS) device by volumes
shipped.” And the top employee-liable mobile device OS? Android. (“Corporate-liable” is research house jargon for “company-owned.” “Employee-liable” is research house jargon for “employee-owned.”)

Ugly news for RIM, whose BlackBerry operating system held that title in 2011. But with the consumerization of IT in full swing and more companies offering “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) plans to their employees, it was inevitable.

By losing the smartphone battle in the consumer market, RIM has lost its footing in the enterprise market it long dominated. Now it must fight for relevance in a broader market that’s essentially an estuary of the two. And that’s a tough place to be for a company that’s transitioning to a competitive mobile OS years later than it should have.

“While corporate customers will continue to offer Blackberry as a corporate-liable device, they are also now much more open to offering iOS as well and giving end users a choice of devices,” IDC Mobile Enterprise Program Manager Stacy Crook told AllThingsD. “From a BYOD standpoint, the Blackberries will also continue to easily make the approved device list, but again, most companies with a BYOD strategy will allow for iOS and increasingly, Android is starting to make more of those lists as well. In either of these scenarios, it boils down to end user choice so the end users have to want to choose the BlackBerry device over the others.”

And these days fewer and fewer are making that choice. Which is why strong adoption of BlackBerry 10 is crucial to RIM’s longevity. The “You Will Use a BlackBerry and That’s an Order” market is disappearing, whittled down by corporations’ widening embrace of BYOD. RIM’s battle for the enterprise space is increasingly becoming the same one it already lost in the consumer space. And it can ill afford to lose it a second time.

BlackBerry 10 really needs to be “a quantum leap over anything that’s out there,” to quote former RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie.

According to RIM it will be. And the company, for its part, says it has no intention of forfeiting the enterprise market to anyone.

“BlackBerry continues to be the best mobile platform for business, providing a complete enterprise mobility solution, including smartphones and tablets managed by a scalable, reliable and highly secure software platform,” the company said in a statement given to AllThingsD. “Our infrastructure is trusted by some of the most security conscious organisations in the US and over 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies. We’ve been meeting with many of our top enterprise customers and they are excited about BlackBerry 10 and its potential.”