John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Enterprise Still Grabbing the iPads Out of Apple’s Hands

stack_of_ipads_380Steve Jobs once said that, though Apple chose not to push the iPad hard into business at launch, “it’s being grabbed out of our hands, anyways.”

In the ensuing years, Apple became more proactive about selling the device into enterprise, though, even now, Jobs’s “grabbing it out of our hands” quip seems to hold true. As Apple likes to remind us, 94 percent of the Fortune 500 and more than 85 percent of the Global 500 are testing or deploying iPads.

For a product so young, that’s impressive enterprise penetration. And it should become more so in the year ahead. This according to Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair, who said he has seen big gains for the iPad in business over the last few months. The reasons? BlackBerry’s collapse and Android’s failure to gain meaningful traction in the enterprise space.

Blair theorizes that BlackBerry’s ill-starred attempt to sell itself inflamed concerns about the future viability of the company’s platform, and gave corporations good reason to migrate their employees to other devices. That opened up a significant opportunity for Apple — particularly since Android continues to struggle for gains in enterprise.

“While a more popular platform than iOS globally, [Android] is seeing very low adoption rates in the enterprise overall, particularly with tablets,” Blair said in a note to clients this week. “We believe that most IT managers are avoiding the platform for large-scale rollouts and support due in large part to malware concerns.”

Meanwhile, Apple has significantly improved the iPad value proposition, fielding a new iPad Air and a mightier iPad mini. And it has made both more compelling with its decision to offer its iWork productivity suite free with any new iOS device.

Said Blair, “Our recent work points to tremendous momentum for iPad in the enterprise over the last few months and we believe that this may be one of the most important trends for Apple as we move into the New Year.”

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