The iPhone (News - Alert) is now proving more popular than the BlackBerry among the corporate crowd, at least according to a recent study from mobile services company iPass.

Among the enterprise workers polled for iPass’ (News - Alert) Mobile Workforce Report, 45 percent proclaimed themselves iPhone users, putting Apple’s flagship phone in first place.

RIM’s BlackBerry, once the dominant device in the business world, lost market share among those surveyed, dipping to 32 percent from 35 percent in 2010. Google’s Android doubled its share, inching its way into third place past Nokia’s (News - Alert) Symbian with a 21 percent share among all respondents.

Beyond the enterprise horse race, mobile usage has surged in the workplace. A full 95 percent of mobile employees now use smartphones, a jump from 85 percent in 2010. And a whopping 91 percent use their smartphones for work, a 26 percent increase from 2010.

“Today’s mobile employees are critical to the success of every enterprise, contributing 240 more work hours a year than their non-mobile counterparts,” said iPass CEO and President Evan Kaplan. “Connectivity is essential because work is no longer where you go but what you do. While increasing iPhone usage in the workplace was inevitable, this is the tipping point when the iPhone has overcome the Blackberry on its traditional enterprise turf, and business smartphones are in the hands of nearly every knowledge worker.”

The surge in mobile ownership is being triggered by the growing “bring your own device” policies put in place by more and more companies, according to iPass. Among the workers polled, 42 percent use their own personally purchased smartphones on the job, up from the 34 percent recorded last year.

And beyond smartphones, tablets are also gaining traction in the workplace, with 44 percent of those polled using tablets, up from 33 percent last year.

On the plus side, 69 percent of the mobile workers surveyed called themselves “highly proficient” with technology, compared with only six percent who ranked themselves as fairly proficient or not proficient at all. Because of that, a full 81 percent say they only contact IT as a last resort. That should be good news to all you IT pros hopefully being spared the added workload of having to support all those iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android users whenever they run into trouble.

On the minus side, the report discovered that the increasing prevalence of mobile devices has resulted in a more active workforce giving up sleep and exercise for the sake of their jobs. Around one-third of mobile workers admitted to sleeping less because of work, while more than half said they rarely if ever exercise due to the ease of staying on the job via their portable devices.

Conducted between September 27 and October 26 of last year, the surveyed solicited responses from more than 2,300 mobile workers across more than 1,100 enterprises around the world.

The iPass study echoes the findings of a similar report released last year by Enterprise Management Associates. EMA (News - Alert) also found the BlackBerry losing some of corporate audience in the face of the iPhone’s growing popularity.

RIM has certainly seen its share of troubles with a dwindling smartphone market share, weak demand for its Playbook tablet, and a recent shakeup in management. But I think its drop to second place in iPass’s report has more to do with the iPhone. The BlackBerry is still highly popular among enterprises who value its tight security. RIM even fought back against various foreign governments last year after they requested access to BlackBerry corporate data in the name of national security.

Rather, the surge seen by the iPhone and Android devices is just another result of the consumerization of IT. Corporate employees want to use the same devices both at home and at work as the lines between the two worlds continue to shrink. So ironically, BlackBerry’s reputation as more of a corporate device than a personal device may actually be doing it more harm than good as Apple and Android continue to carve out a greater niche among business workers.

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