**Editor’s Note:

Click here
for our list of November’s hottest selling smartphones to see how the iPhone fared against the competition.

iPhones and iPads are hot commodities among users at small and medium businesses (SMBs), but Apple better keep an eye on Samsung in its rearview mirror.

That’s what Intermedia, the cloud IT services and business applications provider, has revealed in its "2013 Small + Medium Business Mobile Trends Report."

The report says that Apple’s gadgets accounted for more than three in four (76 percent) mobile-device activations (190,000) on its network since January. That’s counter to studies which say Android has an overall lead in market share.

The annual report found that Samsung has pulled ahead of the competition in the past two years to establish itself as the No. 2 device manufacturer among Intermedia’s SMB customers surpassing activations of all other Android manufacturers, as well as Windows and BlackBerry mobile devices.

"Small and medium-sized businesses are choosing Apple for mobile delivery of their cloud IT services at an incredible rate," said Michael Gold, president of Intermedia. "Many customers already leverage Intermedia services on smartphones and tablets as the primary front-end for running their business. Samsung and Apple will compete intensely for these business users by driving down prices, extending functionality, and addressing SMB needs like security. This means the ultimate winner will be businesses themselves."

Other results of the study revealed that activation spikes are not tied to holiday sales; businesses have largely ignored Apple’s less-expensive iPhone 5c (even older iPhone models were activated more than the 5c); and Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform grew by roughly 93 percent among SMB users, despite still trailing far behind iOS and Android.

Intermedia says mobile-device activations are rising across all manufacturers as opposed to vendors trading share-of-activations implying that smartphones and tablets have yet to reach full saturation in the SMB market.

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