In the past, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry line has been the smartphone of choice for business users, but one important customer is switching to the iPhone (News - Alert) – the U.S. government.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that it will be giving its employees iPhones and iPads instead of BlackBerry phones, starting in May.

NOAA’s Chief Information Officer Joe Klimavicz told Bloomberg that the reason for the move is that Apple’s (News - Alert) products are easier to integrate into their existing systems than RIM’s phones.

“Times are changing and technology is changing and we have to look at our technologies and see how we can do things more efficiently,” he said.

NOAA is not the only company to recently make the switch as several other notable companies have tossed in their BlackBerry phones for iPhone and Android (News - Alert)-based phones. They include Halliburton, Credit Suisse, Barclays Capital and Standard Chartered.

BlackBerry’s native email system and its security features made it the preferred mobile platform for mobile professionals for awhile, but the recent emergence of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s (News - Alert) Android platform have eclipsed whatever gains the BlackBerry had, according to industry experts.

The past year has been a tough one for the Waterloo, Canada-based Research In Motion, particularly when BlackBerry users suffered an outage lasting four days and an update to the BlackBerry OS was delayed. RIM installed a new CEO, Thorstein Heins, out of apparent desperation with the direction of the company.

Heins, however, said the company is “ready to compete” in the tough smartphone market, hoping that new products on the horizon will allow RIM to recapture its former market share.

RIM is expected to launch a new line of phones later this year.

The company also recently rolled out BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft (News - Alert) Office 365, which will allow organizations to sync BlackBerry email, calendar and organizer with Microsoft Exchange servers, as well as providing business users with self-service abilities, like resetting passwords.