Posted on 01/27/2011 2:24:14 AM PST by Swordmaker
The iPad continued to surge into the enterprise as Q4 activations jumped more than 50%, while Windows Mobile devices dropped out of Top 10, says Good Technology report.
The good news for Google: CIOs seem to be very fond of Android devices, which accounted for 30% of net new devices deployed by enterprise users in the fourth quarter of 2010.
The bad news for Google: CIOs are infatuated with Apple's iPad and iPhone, which rushed into big corporations at more than twice the rate of Android devices as iOS units accounted for 65% of Q4 enterprise activations.
Those figures come from the aggregate customer experiences of Good Technology, a fast-growing provider of enterprise-level software that manages mobile devices based on the Apple and Android platforms but not RIM's Blackberry or Windows Phone 7.
Good said it based its reports on the experiences of its "thousands of customers across every major industry," including more than 40 of the Fortune 100, but those experiences are limited to Apple's iOS and Google's Android.
(Here's how Good explained the absence of those products from its quarterly mobile-device activation report: "Since RIM devices use only the Blackberry Enterprise Server for corporate email access, Good does not have insight into Blackberry handset activation trends and they are not reflected in this report. Windows Phone 7 devices are also not reflected in our activation numbers as we do not yet support Windows Phone 7 due to limitations in its Silverlight API/SDK framework.")
This is the second such quarterly report Good has released as part of its efforts to monitor "the changing landscape of IT and mobile enterprise technology," the company said, and some of the latest numberssuch as the ones above showing that iOS activations more than doubled those for Androidare eye-popping.
Now, it's certainly possible that many of those Fortune 100 corporations that are not customers of Good Technology are huge fans of Blackberries or are widely committed to Android devices.
But since CIOs from every size of company and across every industry are under enormous pressure to mobilize their enterprise, I think it's important to showcase these broad findings as at least a partial indicator of the trends taking hold across a wide swath of large corporations. And if somebody's got some additional information showing different trends, we'll be happy to share those as well.
From Good's perspective, though, 2011 is shaping up to be "the year of the tablet."
John Herrema, Good's senior VP of corporate strategy, said this in a press release about his company's enterprise-mobility report: "If 2010 was all about the consumerization of the enterprise, 2011 will be the year of the tablet.
"The iPad came out of nowhere to define this new category, and we are already seeing very compelling Android tablets entering the space, with more on the horizon."
Just how profound has the impact of the iPad been since its launch in April 2010? "The iPad revolutionized the enterprise mobility landscape, going from 0% of Good's activations in March 2010 up to 22% by the end of the year," the report says. (For extensive analyses and perspectives on the iPad's impact on CIOs and the enterprise, please be sure to check out our "Recommended Reading" list at the end of this column.)
Bear in mind that 22% figure isn't restricted to tabletsrather, that number means that iPad activations totaled almost a quarter of all enterprise-level activations of smartphones and tablets combined.
That's consistent with an extremely vital point about the iPad that I've been making repeatedly over the past few months: The iPad's far more than just a cool new gadget, it's not just the latest fanboy fetish, and it's anything but simply a supersized iPhone.
Instead, the iPad has proven to be a powerfuldare I say revolutionary?business tool that allows not only executives but also mainstream workers throughout the organization to see, manipulate, and analyze ideas and possibilities more simply and more rapidly than they've ever been able to do before.
This accelerates the generation of ideas, the analysis of possibilities, the collaborative impact of mobile organizations, and the visual presentation of ideas thatwhether we like it or notis becoming the norm in our frenetic and visual-oriented world.
The iPad's not perfect, and lots of other companies will come out with terrific alternatives, such as the Blackberry Playbook and also many others that will be based on Android's forthcoming tablet-specific OS and Windows Phone 7 as well.
But CIOs in the here and now are showing an intense and rapidly expanding desire to make the iPad not just a status symbol for a handful of executives but rather a widespread and essential element of their IT-powered business strategy.
And to give you a better sense of which mobile devices your fellow CIOs have been selecting, here are several key findings from the Good quarterly report:
By industry, the top three verticals ranked by activations for the last four months of the year were financial services, which accounted for more than 25% of all turn-ons; healthcare, averaging about 18%; and legal/professional services at about 16%.
For those same four months, iPad activations were most prevalent in financial services as that sector accelerated its leading iPad adoption rate from 28% in September to 40% of all iPad activations in December.
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Well, duh... of course the iPad is making faster inroads than Android tablets. There isn’t an Android tablet out yet that doesn’t run on anything but an Android pohone operating system.
It’d be more accurate to see these numbers after the Android 3.0 OS comes out and has had some time to be noticed. As that’ll be the 1st Android tablet OS actually to be released.
I’d like to see a comparison between the iPad and the BlackBerry PlayBook
Buy apple stock. Even at 340 a share right now. Their sales over the next two years, especially in China, is going to be mindblowing. Some analysts are talking 500+ a share in the next 12 months. I can believe it.
I don't understand. Present statistics of use are less accurate than future statistics that don't exist yet?
The article compares iPads, which aren’t merely iPhones writ large... with current Android tablets, which are only running Android phone software.
It’s like compating the iPhone to the iPad and wondering why businessmen like to work on the iPad more than the iPhone.
IE: It’s apples to oranges.
When the Android tablet software is released (version 3.0)... then we can see how the iPad compares against another tablet. Until then, though, we’re just comparing tablets versus smart phones.
If you are saying that the current Android tablets are disappointing, I would agree.
When the Android tablet software is released (version 3.0)... then we can see how the iPad compares against another tablet. Until then, though, were just comparing tablets versus smart phones.
Again, I would agree that the current Android tablets are underpowered. Will the next operating system improve the user experience? Probably. And I have no doubt that the computer industry will be looking at the number of sales. Tablets are here to stay. Apple demonstrated that with large sales and high user satisfaction. Now everybody wants to get into this market. That is going to be a good market to watch. There will be lots of players, including RIM.
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