With BlackBerry floundering, iPad is there to pick up the enterprise pieces
Historically, Apple has never been, nor has it ever wanted to be, an enterprise driven company. Indeed, Steve Jobs never preoccupied himself with selling to the enterprise, and stories abound regarding his distaste for CIOs.
Nonetheless, both Apple's iPhone and iPad have made tremendous inroads into the enterprise world over the past few years. Looking ahead, this trend is likely to become even more pronounced now that BlackBerry, despite all attempts to revive the once great company, appears to be circling the drain.
As it stands now, nearly 94% of Fortune 500 companies are either using or testing 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.
Blair explains that while Android may be more popular than iOS on a marketshare basis, IT managers are, by and large, still more likely to choose iOS. Blair also adds that he has seen "tremendous momentum for iPad in the enterprise over the last few months."
On a related note, and in yet another example illustrating this changing of the enterprise guard, we recently reported that Pfizer's 90,000-strong workforce will soon be transitioning away from BlackBerry in favor of iOS and Android devices.
