The corporate world is typically a place where technology can take time to change, and new devices don't usually make their appearance for a long time after they arrived in the hands of consumers. But it would seem like this is different when it comes to tablets.

A new study from Intermedia (News - Alert) shows that tablet adoption is growing fast in small businesses, as these companies are moving to the new form factor to complement their existing computer and smartphone devices. According to the results, it would appear that both iPad and Android (News - Alert) tablets make the bulk of new activations, and are seeing a tremendous adoption rate.

The iPad remains the top contender in both small and medium businesses, but even Android tablets are seeing a rise. In fact, according to numbers published by Intermedia, a company that offers cloud based Exchange services, it would seem like these tablets represent 25 percent of all mobile device activations, with smartphones being the remaining 75 percent. While phones still dominate, the tablet market grew quickly and in a very short time.

In fact, even if Apple's device remains the top choice, the Galaxy tablets from Samsung (News - Alert) saw their numbers double since October of last year, with all other manufacturers seeing a growth of some type in the tablet world. According to Michael Gold, president of Intermedia, this could be explained by employees working remotely more often than before. He said, “Small and medium-sized business owners and their employees are increasingly working remotely, so taking the capabilities they have in the office and combining them with mobile apps for a true on-the-go workforce is becoming more important.”

The company manages 400,000 hosted Exchange accounts, and looked at how many of them used ActiveSync in order to access the service from mobile devices. The results show that 25 percent of those activations are tablets. This is up from 19 percent in October 2011. In fact, smartphone activations decreased in order to make place for tablets. Even the KindleFire from Amazon is making its way into the workplace.

This data only covers ActiveSync access, which doesn't include BlackBerry (News - Alert). These numbers basically show that while workers still prefer their phones when on the go, there's only so much you can do on a phone when you need to be productive. So instead of bringing a laptop, many choose to go with a tablet. With the more powerful ones being introduced in the last 6 months, such as the iPad 3 and the Galaxy Note, workers now see tablets as a viable work platform.

Intermedia is a premier provider of cloud services such as hosted Exchange and other SMB solutions. Their offerings include Exchange 2010 email, Lync Secure Instant Messaging, and SharePoint document management. It was founded in 1995 and now has over 400,000 paid accounts from companies around the world.