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iPhone makes enterprise market inroads for Apple

Apple's iPhone has recently seen greater adoption in the enterprise market, with its business market share more than tripling in the past year, a new report has found.

By the end of the year, Apple will have shipped an estimated 2 million iPhones to corporate accounts, according to a new report from Deutsche Bank. As first noted by Fortune Brainstorm Tech, that would give Apple a projected 7 percent share of the enterprise smartphone market, well up from the 2 percent share in 2008.

Exclusively enterprise use still remains just a sliver of total iPhone adoption, though. Of 25 million iPhones cited in the Deutsche Bank study, about 17 million are for consumer use. The remainder — just over 5 million — use their iPhone for mixed personal and business use.

Apple's progress in the business world is cited in part because of an October report from J.D. Power and Associates, which found the iphone to be the top smartphone for both consumers and business users. Apple topped all other business smartphones with a score of 803, ahead of second-place BlackBerry with 724.

Another asset for the iPhone is its large library of applications, as well as its virtual keyboard. While the touchscreen keyboard has been cited by many as a reason businesses avoid the iPhone, the report said that the perception that physical keyboards are necessary is a "fallacy."

In June, Apple started to be more aggressive in courting potential enterprise customers when it released a guide to help system administrators deploy iPhones throughout large businesses.