iPad Still Trouncing Android in Enterprise
Apple’s share of the overall tablet market may be declining amid a flood of tablets powered by Google’s Android operating system. But in the enterprise space the company’s iPad remains the tablet of choice by a wide margin.
New research from mobile device management company Good Technology, which serves about half of the Fortune 100, shows that iPads accounted for 93.2 percent of tablet activations across its customer base in the fourth quarter of 2012. Meanwhile, Android tablets accounted for just 6.8 percent.
For Android, that’s a piddling share of this particular market segment, but it is improving. In January of 2012, Android’s share of tablet activations at Good’s clients was only 2.7 percent. So the OS did gain momentum over the course of the year. But clearly it has been slow going.
Why is Good seeing such a big disparity between iPad and Android tablet activations? A combination of the so-called “consumerization of IT” and some major iPad deployments, most likely. The iPad’s installed base is quite large, so it makes sense that the “Bring Your Own Device” programs that companies are offering to their employees these days might result in a disproportionate influx of the devices into enterprise. Add to that some strong iOS productivity apps and some large deployments of company-owned iPads — recall how often Apple likes to drop that “almost every company in the Fortune 500 is testing or deploying iPad” sound bite — and the reasons for Apple’s lead becomes self-evident.
It’s worth noting here as well that Apple’s dominance in Good’s particular slice of the enterprise space doesn’t end with tablets. It includes smartphones, too. According to Good, the iPad and iPhone accounted for 77 percent of new device activations across its customer base in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from 71 percent in 2011.