Tablets and smartphones continue to make headway in the enterprise as companies have surrendered to -- if not embraced -- the BYOD (bring your own device) movement. It turns out that enterprise users prefer mobile devices running Apple over Android by a margin of around four to one.
Such are the findings of a quarterly report on mobile-device activation from Good Technology, a provider of mobile management and security tools for enterprise organizations representing an array of industries, from health care to financial institutions. The company found that iOS devices -- iPhones and iPads -- accounted for over 79.9 percent of all mobile-device activations from January through March this year. Android devices represented the remaining 20 percent. According to Good, this is a notable shift from Q1 of last year when the split was 70/30 percent.
Notably, Good's picture isn't entirely complete; neither Microsoft nor RIM is represented, a point the company acknowledged. Redmond's absent from the list because the company just started to support Windows Phone 7.5 this month. Good does not have any insight into RIM device activation.
Nevertheless, Good's findings provide a third-party perspective on how the mobile wars are shaping up between Android and Apple, specifically in the enterprise, not just in terms of which platform is most preferred but also which devices get the most play.
Overall, Apple devices represented around 80 percent of all newly activated mobile devices for the first quarter and crushed the limited competition on the tablet front: iPads collectively represented roughly 97.3 percent of all tablet activations, whereas Android tablets came in at 2.7 percent. The picture could change as more organizations roll out better Android-based tablets, as well as systems running Microsoft's mobile platform. "With Windows 8, we expect more competition for Apple and the iPad in the enterprise tablet space, especially for proactive, company-owned device deployments," said John Herrema, Good Technology's SVP of corporate strategy.
