Tablets at Work
February 20, 2013, Tablet Strategy Conference, Burlingame, CA—Ben Bajarin from Creative Strategies looked at the state of tablets in the enterprise. The number of tablets appearing in the workplace is tracking the total sales of tablets. Some are company issued, and others are BYOD.
Tablets are reshaping the face of computing in business, enterprises, and all are driven by the growing consumer use and demand. The tablet is reinventing the nature of personal computing, by being more intimate, mobile, and portable. Already, tablets are starting to displace notebooks, and as supplemental devices are well suited for the lightweight tasks for most users.
Computing is moving to multiple platforms, with the lightweight consumption tasks relegated to the tablets. The tablets suit the mass market requirements. Meanwhile, the notebooks, although over-serving the needs of most users, are used for the heavy lifting.
Tablet sales are projected to continue growing with a 55 percent increase in units this year. Already, tablets outsell PCs in the US, and soon will be outselling all notebooks worldwide. The sub-8-inch tablets hold about 47.5 percent of the market for the last quarter of ’12, and are growing market share. This category is expected to dominate the market in ’15. At the same time, desktop machine sales will stay flat and notebooks will drop or be fairly flat.
As we enter the multiplatform era, enterprises are starting to support all platforms, so software and interoperability are becoming more important. The IT groups need to ensure that all apps, software, and services can be supplied as needed within the entire enterprise. Getting the right device for the job will increase platform and software fragmentation.
Therefore, the IT groups need to find or develop platform agnostic software for all base functions. The multiscreen environment will require that more work move to the cloud and data synchronization across devices will become much more important. Recent surveys indicate that 90 percent of mobile workers use multiple devices for their work.
Those mobile workers are doing various types of work; point of sales functions on a tablet can replace cash registers, and marketing groups can have access to all product collateral, without increasing the mass and volume of paper for customer presentations. Tablets can replace training and technical manuals and enable field force automation. Other apps are emerging and all will improve productivity, mobility, and other worker needs.
These changes in workflows call for reformatting content into “glance-able” formats. The advent of touch interfaces introduces alternatives to the mouse and keyboard, and the new paradigm will drive software to be more natural and intuitive. The complete design philosophy needs to change to address the new formats and interfaces in the next generation of software. The new form factors for the platforms and apps means that more functions will be software-centric and all software will have to be multiplatform and multiscreen.
The BYOD movement can save companies money, as most of the devices are user-bought. In BYOD, the display software and services can be put into wrappers and security can be added on top of the user interface for custom apps. As more businesses move to tablets, they will buy more of the hardware for higher control and security, but will still allow BYOD for some users. Savings will accrue from just supporting the devices, rather than buying them.
BYOD is still in its early stages, so many issues still have to be worked out across the various industries. Since most security issues are related to device loss, all mobile devices will need to have key remote wipe capabilities. Security will vary depending upon use cases and user access to privileged data. This change in risk will require a separation of enterprise and personal functions.
Although the iPad is leading, the primary challenger is Lenovo for both notebooks and PCs, with both moving to Windows 8 for enterprise functions that map to tablets. At present, Android seems to be less robust for enterprise functions, and iOS, despite its lack of security capabilities, continues to grow. Also for the enterprise, HP is going to be offering a premium, business-related tablet.
