With BlackBerry on the decline, there's a battle heating up for enterprise smartphone users and so far Apple is winning in a big way.
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According to the latest numbers released by mobile enterprise tech firm Good Technology, iOS devices accounted for around 80% of new activations on corporate networks in the first quarter of 2012, while Android-based devices accounted for just 20%. No other mobile platform, such as Windows Mobile, registered enough activations on the quarter to crack Good's study, which tracked mobile device activations across thousands of companies that registered at least five activated mobile devices. Good also says that BlackBerry devices were not on the study since the company does not support the platform and thus "does not have insight" into BlackBerry activations.
The numbers in Apple's favor only grow starker when Good broke down activations for tablets in the enterprise, as iPads accounted for a whopping 97.3% of enterprise tablet activations, while Android tablets accounted for just 2.7%. The financial services industry was by far the biggest consumer in the enterprise tablet market as it accounted for 40.8% of all iPad activations in the first quarter of 2012, followed by the business and professional services industry and the life sciences industry, which each accounted for just under 9.5% of iPad activations.
In terms of individual devices, the iPhone 4S was the most popular enterprise device on the quarter, accounting for 37% of all mobile device activations. The latest version of the iPhone was followed by the iPad 2 (17.7% of activations), the iPhone 4 (15.2% of activations) and the newest iPad (4.3% of activations). Good noted that the new iPad would likely have had a bigger impact on the enterprise market for the quarter if it had been released earlier than March, where it accounted for more than 12% of all device activations on the month.
The Motorola Droid, the Samsung Galaxy S II, the Google Nexus and the Sprint Evo 4G were the only Android devices to make the top 10 list of most-activated enterprise devices on the quarter and each of those devices accounted for less than 2% of all activations.
Apple has long been seen as the heir to BlackBerry's claim as the top device for enterprise users. A report released late last year by iPass found that iPhones accounted for 45% of all mobile devices in the enterprise while BlackBerry devices accounted for 32.2%. That survey found that Android-based devices accounted for 21% of all devices used in the enterprise.
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