New Study Shows iOS Snagging Market Share from Android in the Enterprise Market

[Akshay Masand]

Data that was harvested by Egnyte, an enterprise file sharing and cloud storage company, shows that Apple’s iOS platform, led by the iPhone, is growing its share of the enterprise market, while Google’s Android user base continues to contract. According to TechCrunch, Egnyte tracked which mobile operating systems were used to access the film’s servers, with the sample comprising of 100,000 paying customers over the past year and a half.

Although the report doesn’t reflect an exhaustive rundown of the worldwide enterprise market, U.S. companies accounted for 80% of the data with the remaining 20% attributed to European entities. The report gives an overview of how iOS and Android are faring in the corporate marketplace. Until recently, the share of smartphones and tablets running Google’s mobile platform had been holding steady at 30% while iOS devices accounted for nearly 70% of Egnyte’s traffic. Over the third and fourth quarters of 2011, the iPhone and iPad took a 28% and 40% share of traffic. Interestingly, usage of Apple’s iOS products flip-flopped during 2012, with the iPhone capturing a 42% share, while the iPad fell to 27%. However, the preliminary data for the first quarter of 2013 shows that Android impression fell to 22% as the iOS platform gained ground, accounting for a respective 48% and 30% of tracked users.

Egnyte told TechCrunch that smartphones are likely being used for many business-oriented tasks like checking and responding to corporate email. Another factor could be the current limitations of tablets, which still haven’t’ completely replicated the usability of enterprise laptops. According to Egnyte:

Apple seems to have at least temporarily won the hearts and minds of business users with its products accounting for about 70 percent of our traffic. This is important because it’s a flip-flop from the days of old, where Apple products were rarely seen in the corporate landscape. It’s also an indication that when BYOD wrested control over what devices consumers used from IT, they overwhelmingly chose an easy to use product that focused on UI and usability, perhaps even at times over depth.

The report comes on the heels of another study conducted by Good Technology, which found iOS devices accounting for 77% of all enterprise activations across its network for the fourth quarter of 2012. Over the same period, Android dropped from 29% to 22.7%. We’ll have to see how things out in the future as both companies continue to push for a larger share of the enterprise market.

Source: TechCrunch

[runey71]

For years my company used Blackberry. With RIM being dead in the water they trued going down the Android path, probably because it seemed cheaper at the time. The 'experiment' didn't work for a variety of reasons including unreliability of the phones themselves ( multiple brands and models were tried ). Now the whole company is getting iPhones.

[claustin]

Haha, "other." I see what you did there. That chart would be even more impressive if it was just iOS and Android.

[ssfirme]

haha iphone still SUCKS