Companies attracted to App Store offerings

The iPhone is slowly gaining momentum in the enterprise market, according to a recent report issued by TBI Research. The analysts believe employees have been a contributing factor, as many executives have first purchased iPhones for personal use before pushing the idea to their company's IT department.

The research group believes that overall smartphone usage, which now sits at 10-15 percent of businesses, could grow to 25-30 percent over the next five years. Over the same time period, the group of corporations using multiple platforms is expected to increase to 20 percent.

iPhone adoption is expected to be particularly aggressive in industries such as media, entertainment, hospitality, transportation, or consumer goods. Although Apple has worked to attract enterprise customers, many still believe the iPhone is much less secure than RIM's BlackBerry platform.

"The two industries we see as the least likely of switching from Blackberries are Finance and Government," the report says. "These are huge industries, but they make up only 20 percent of the total US workforce. That still leaves 80 percent of the total 150 million US workforce."

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore recently provided a similar forecast, expecting 2 million iPhones in the enterprise market by the end of the year. If the numbers turn out to be accurate, the company's market share among business users will more than triple to reach 7 percent. [via The Business Insider]

by MacNN Staff