The number of Apple devices used by enterprise employees has doubled in the past three years, a new survey finds.
And nearly all of the companies surveyed are planning on buying more.
The survey of 300 IT professionals was conducted by Jamf Software, which makes its living by helping IT professionals manage Apple devices. The company was founded by two IT professionals who loved Apple products but were frustrated by a lack of IT tools to help them deal with a lot of Macs — to do things like install software across hundreds of PCs, set them up on a corporate network, or troubleshoot problems.
The two IT professionals turned their frustration into a company with 4,000 businesses and schools as customers managing more than 3 million Apple products.
In this new survey, Jamf took the pulse of 300 IT pros on how they are buying and using Apple product these days, and found out:
- 9 out of 10 companies officially support Apple products - iPhones (91%), iPads (89%) and Mac computers (60%)
- 98 percent of respondents expect the number of Apple devices to grow at their business by at least 25 percent in the next three years
- 40 percent of participants indicate they will be given additional IT budget to support these Apple devices and 20 percent indicated that more staff will be hired to manage the increasing number of Apple devices
This validates much of what Apple CEO Tim Cook has been saying about Apple killing it in the enterprise. Apple is still considered mostly a consumer company, but as Cook says, "iPhone is used in 97% of the Fortune 500, and 91% of the Global 500, and iPad is used in 98% of the Fortune 500 and 93% of the Global 500."
Apple has now been trying to lure more enterprises into buying more products by adding new features for enterprise needs, such as improved security.
The Jamf survey shows success on Apple's part.
9 out of 10 companies are officially supporting iPhones and iPads for business use.
The number of people using Apple devices have grown from 10% in 2011 to 25% in 2014 at one-third of the companies surveyed
IT pros have to support Apple devices because employees are insisting on using them.
