Apple's Enterprise Strategy: Win With Consumers

Some 21 percent of surveyed enterprise information workers are using one or more Apple products for work, Forrester Research says. Considering Apple doesn't really go out of its way to design or sell products to enterprises, that's significant. But Apple now has market momentum on its side, plus a growing acceptance of "bring your own device" support on the part of enterprises. 


Although the number-one place where consumers use tablets is in the living room, 37 percent of U.S. tablet owners take them to work as well. In a recent Forrester Research survey of 9,912 technology end users at SMBs and enterprises in 17 countries, Forrester found that workers in Brazil, Russia, India, China and Mexico actually led demand for wanting to use a tablet for work, and being willing to share the cost of the device with their employers.

Almost half of enterprises (1000 employees or more) are issuing Macs to at least some employees and they plan a 52 percent increase in the number of Macs they issue in 2012, according to Forrester Research managers and executives are more than twice as likely to use Apple products, suggesting an adoption pattern where the ability to use the device is something of a “perquisite,” much as at one time the ability to use a BlackBerry was a perquisite for enterprise executives. 


 But younger information workers (IT staffs for example) are twice as likely to use Apple products as older ones. Higher income workers are more likely to use Apple products as well, but there is a “younger worker” issue here. Most of the sample of 10,000 global information workers earns less than $50,000 a year, but the adoption rate of Apple products is almost 17 percent even in the bottom quartile of workers who make less than $12,000 per year.



Keep in mind, also, that the survey was global in scope, and Information workers in countries outside North America and Europe were more likely to use Apple products for work. Annual salaries also might tend to be lower in non-European and North American settings.




source: Forrester Research



Where click through rates are concerned, screen size matters. Simply put, larger screens tend to get higher click through rates, and some devices tend to have higher engagement than others. Smart phone screens tend to get click throughs at about a two-percent to four-percent rate.



Larger tablet screens such as those sported by the Apple iPad or Samsung Galazy get CTRs of about nine percent. The results are generally similar across device brands.