Apple's iPhone takes 68.2% of new small & medium business smartphone activations

A new survey of small- and medium-size business smartphone activations found that Apple's iPhone controls the lion's share of growth, while the iPad represents nearly all tablets sold.

Intermedia manages more than 500,000 premium-hosted e-mail accounts with Microsoft Exchange. According to the company's data collected from September through November, Apple's iPhone represented 68.2 percent of smartphone activations by small and medium businesses.

Apple's control of this segment of the enterprise market left Google Android in a distant second place, with 25.1 percent of activations during the three-month span. Research in Motion's BlackBerry platform accounted for 4.1 percent, while Windows Phone took 2.6 percent.

Intermedia told AppleInsider that the launch of the iPhone 5 in late September helped Apple's number of new device activations surge 22 percent.

Among tablets in small- and medium-size businesses, the iPad was dominant, representing 92.6 percent of new activations. In second was BlackBerry's PlayBook, with 5.3 percent, while Microsoft Surface came in third with 2.1 percent.

While the Surface's presence over the three-month span was small, Intermedia noted that Surface activations grew 45 percent month over month after the device arrived in stores in late October.

Apple routinely notes during its quarterly earnings reports that almost all Fortune 500 companies are deploying or testing both the iPhone and iPad, but the latest data from Intermedia shows that Apple's iOS devices are also seeing strong growth among smaller businesses.