Apple's iOS nabbed 76% of small & medium business device activations in 2013, study says
According to SMB email management company Intermedia, some 190,000 iPhones and iPads were activated on its network in the first ten months of 2013, grossly outpacing No. 2 Samsung's 29,000 activations.
Context & Ripple Effects
Intermedia's activation counts put hard numbers behind a shift already visible in the corpus: back in February 2012 Chitika measured iOS passing Mac OS in share of web traffic on record iPhone and iPad sales, and the SMB segment is now showing the same tilt. On Intermedia's own network, roughly 190,000 iPhones and iPads activated across ten months of 2013 against 29,000 Samsung devices — a better than six-to-one margin among exactly the businesses that historically standardized on Windows.
The story travelled unusually widely for a single-vendor dataset, picked up by Gigaom Research, MacNN, Yahoo! News, SecurityWeek and PadGadget, and it lands alongside Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley's finding that the iPhone 5s and 5c rank among the top three sellers at all four major U.S. carriers. The significance runs deeper than one quarter: as JAMF's founders noted of 2002, Apple was then a marginal player where Windows PCs owned the enterprise.
First-order effects
- For the SMBs on Intermedia's platform, iOS is now the de facto provisioning default — IT staff planning mail, security and support for these fleets plan around iPhones and iPads first, with Samsung holding under a quarter of activations.
- Samsung enters 2014 selling into a small-business base where its Android devices trail Apple by more than 160,000 activations on a single hosted-email network, making carrier strength alone insufficient to win the segment.
Second-order effects
- Device-management vendors serving small and medium businesses gain leverage as fleets mix more iOS with less Android, since administrators now buy tooling to manage employee-chosen Apple hardware rather than enforce a single corporate standard.
- Samsung's realistic response is to bundle security and management features into its enterprise pitch to narrow a gap this size, pushing competition in the SMB toward software and services rather than handset price alone.
Third-order effects
- The pattern confirms what JAMF's history implies: Apple has traveled from a negligible enterprise presence in 2002 to the majority platform in SMB activations, meaning employee-preferred consumer devices now set business IT standards instead of procurement departments.
- If the imbalance holds, mobile line-of-business applications and support ecosystems consolidate around iOS-first development, compounding Apple's advantage and raising Android's cost of competing for business customers.
The trend: Consumer-chosen Apple devices are displacing the Windows-centric fleet as the small and medium business default, with hosted-service activation data becoming the scoreboard.