Samsung Edges Out Apple As Number One Enterprise Smartphone Vendor

Samsung has beaten Apple to become the favourite smartphone vendor for enterprise customers, according to recent findings from ABI Research. The research firm’s latest Enterprise Smartphone vendor matrix found that Samsung edged out its major rival by less than one point when ranked on 18 criteria which would be important to enterprise customers.

On the operating system front, it’s good news for Google’s Android, while further down the rankings, BlackBerry still had supporters did well – beating Nokia as a manufacturer, suggesting that Nokia’s chosen OS Windows Phone is struggling.

Samsung was praised for having a large and diversified partner network, as well as being the first Android vendor to provide an integrated enterprise solution. But what apparently won it the #1 ranking were its scores around ‘Innovation’, as the company’s wider range of enterprise devices and better security features helped it score higher than Apple and take top spot.

Apple received extremely high marks in ABI’s ‘Implementation’ categories due to high iOS smartphone adoption by business users,  as well as the large number of its smartphones that are activated within Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms.

A tight battle behind

Overall, nine device manufacturers were ranked on aspects including workspace management solutions, partnerships and business customer adoption.

Blackberry took third place behind Samsung and Apple, edging out Nokia, which represents almost all Windows Phone-powered devices currently on the market today. Blackberry was praised for its high innovation, as well as its enterprise security, labelled by ABI as ‘gold-standard’, due to several recent enhancements for multi-OS and dual-persona device management.

ABI practice director Dan Shey said that these two separate battles could split the enterprise device market between the four companies, stating, “With the maturing of the smartphone market, we expect OEMs to increasingly broaden their enterprise offerings. The result is that the rankings earned by Samsung, Apple, and BlackBerry will both shift and be challenged as enterprise becomes more reliant on mobile devices, apps, and services.”

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