Apple emerges as the clear winner among enterprise users, claiming the top five spots for device activations, and more than 90 percent of all tablet activations, in Q4 2012

These statistics come from Good Technology, a company which provides mobile device, app, and data security to banks, healthcare organizations, governments, and retailers, including about half of the Fortune 100.

In compiling its report Good analyzed activations by month among its enterprise and government customers that had at least five activated devices over the quarter, to draw conclusions on the overall trends across iOS, Android and Windows Phone platforms. This enabled it to determine the "Top 10" most frequently activated devices in the enterprise sector.

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As shown in the above chart, the iPhone 5 was the most popular device in Q4, representing 32 percent of all activations, followed by iPhone 4S (20%) and iPhone 4 (14%). The top tablet is the iPad3 (12%) with all the other iPad models also included. Two Android smartphones make it into the Top 10, the Samsung Galaxy SIII (5%) and the Droid Razr. (1%). Although the Samsung Galaxy SII is included in the chart it is in 11th place and therefore not in the Top 10.

To put this data in context this chart shows where the activations came from:

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The report comments that the pattern reinforces its finding about the adoption of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies:

Financial Services showed the most growth this quarter. In October, it accounted for 27 percent of activations, and jumped to 37 percent in November, finishing out the quarter with an average of 33.8 percent as the leading industry for iPad adoption. This increase makes sense following Good’s recent 2012 State of BYOD report, which found the Financial Services industry (which includes the Insurance industry) to be one of the biggest supporters of BYOD.

For the chart on Activations by Device Type, Good considered 7 devices. However, Symbian and Windows devices had such a small number of activations that you can hardly see their bars in the chart. Windows Phone activations for the quarter came in at 0.4%. Symbian had marginally more but Windows tablets considerably fewer:

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In the above chart smartphones, the blue and green bars, swamp tablets, the red and purple ones. However it does indicate that the four iPad models taken together are much more important than Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tablet and Kindle Fire. Good however presents a further chart on iOS versus Android tablets that shows that for the quarter as a whole iOS tablets account for almost 90% of activation in the enterprise and government sector and Android has just over 10%
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Taking all this information together what does it mean for developers?

Clearly iOS has the lead in enterprise apps and this is an area where the user has long been accustomed to paying for software. Apple has put in some structures to allow enterprise apps to be managed, but it doesn't have office apps to rival Microsoft. Overall it is something of a surprise that Microsoft isn't dominating the business sector, but it still fails to find the sort of integration that would give it the edge.

As many have pointed out, Microsoft's most profitable strategy would be to deliver Office for iOS. Given that this is unlikely to happen there remains a basic instability in the enterprise mobile market which still could be used to bring about a radical change.

Even Google could change the balance of power. It has recently ported Quickoffice to Chrome as a NaCL app. It should only be a small step to create an Android version.

One possibly high risk strategy would be to assume that Google or Microsoft will eventually overturn Apple's cart and dominate the enterprise because of their more extensive software assets. This suggests you should port Financial Services and Business & Professional Services tablet apps to the Android or WinRT platform now.