Exchange Hoster: Apple Has Momentum on ActiveSync
Even among business users running on Microsoft Exchange, Apple has the momentum when it comes to smartphones and tablets, according to statistics released by one of Microsoft's largest Exchange hosting partners.
Intermedia this month released device activation numbers for all of April for its 320,000 hosted Exchange premium e-mail accounts. It found that Apple iPhones are being activated for synchronization with the accounts at a much faster rate than competitors' smartphones, and the iPad is even more dominant among tablets. (Intermedia was careful to note that no specific user information was reviewed in determining the statistics.)
Intermedia's figures come from the number of customer end users who activated BlackBerry devices on its hosted BlackBerry service and an analysis of devices activated using ActiveSync, the synchronization component in Microsoft Exchange.
According to the New York-based hoster's numbers, new device activations in April broke out as follows:
- 59 percent were iPhones.
- 30 percent were Google Android devices.
- 8 percent were BlackBerry devices.
That leaves 3 percent of activations for all other smartphone platforms, including Windows Phone 7, Symbian and Palm.
The April activations also show how radically Intermedia's overall mix of synchronized smartphones is changing. Counting all activations to date, BlackBerry leads with 46 percent, followed by iPhone with 33 percent and Android with 9 percent. That leaves 12 percent for the other platforms.
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| Source: Intermedia |
On the tablet side, iPad activations by business users are on an upward tear. Intermedia reported that before the launch of the iPad 2, it saw an average of 300 ActiveSync activations of iPads per month. In March that tripled to 900, while in April the figure reached 1,200.
Although other vendors have tried to position their media tablets as more business-focused, the iPad is absolutely dominant among Intermedia's customers. The company says 99.8 percent of tablet activations are iPads.
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 19, 2011