Some US agencies may be shedding BlackBerry from their IT programs, but RIM executive Scott Totzke tells Bloomberg Businesweek that its share of the US government market "is probably increasing," and that it sold 400,000 devices to federal agencies in the past year — perhaps one of the lone bright spots in RIM's struggling overall business. RIM's fiscal fourth quarter of 2012 saw a 19 percent drop in revenue totaling $125 million, and a 21 percent drop in shipments from Q3, and the company has recently seen the departure of a string of high-level executives.

Toztke's math seems to match earlier reports that the US has about half a million federal users with BlackBerrys, with some agencies extolling RIM's focus on security — a selling point that may be bolstered with the company's new emphasis on its enterprise roots. But with safety-obsessed groups like the Department of Defense prepping their own Android systems, talking points on BlackBerry's secure ecosystem may lose the exceptionalism that's buoyed RIM's dominance in Washington so far.