Like them or not, there’s no doubt that Apple’s iPad and the copycat devices that appeared in its wake have become a force to be reckoned with in the mobile computing space. But is there a genuine place for tablet PCs within the enterprise? Is there real demand for them or is the appearance of the tablet in the corporate environment just another aspect of the on-going trend for IT consumerisation?
Widespread adoption of tablet computers is still someway off, but sales of the devices are predicted to buck the trend for reduced spend on IT in 2011 and into 2012. Gartner recently suggested that world-wide tablet spend will more than triple to $29.4 billion (EUR*33.4 billion) in 2011 and increase at an average rate of 52% each year until 2015.
Play things?
“There are some good reasons for these devices to find their way into a corporate environment-and they can be a lot more than just an executive plaything,” said Ronald Dockery, client business manager for Microsoft Ireland.
“The appeal of the tablet is that it allows the end user more choice in terms of how they opt to do their job. It’s a ‘horses for courses’ thing. Some people want a quick access device that will fire up quickly maybe because that suits the way they use certain applications, such as customer relationship management. For others, they may need a device that is well suited to a particular environment such as on the road, where something like pen entry might be much more useful than a keyboard would be.”
“Others still might want a tablet because there is a particular business app that suits their needs and they want to connect to the business LAN and carry out their work more efficiently while also staying connected to their personal lives.”
Cutting edge
Rory O’Neill, senior director for business marketing with RIM, suggests that tablets along with smartphones are at the cutting edge of the evolution of mobile technology. As the power and functionality gap between consumer and enterprise devices continues to close, he believes it will be growing demand from the end user that drives adoption in the enterprise setting.
“Tablets and smartphones are at the epicentre of the trend of IT consumerisation as employee expectations become increasingly advanced. But far from believing that only end-users stand to gain from this development, at Blackberry we believe that companies should also embrace the opportunities this provides,” he said.
“Advanced technology can help employers achieve business goals, transform their organisation and offer competitive advantage. For example, our PlayBook tablet can help businesses improve communication and productivity while also benefitting from the security, manageability and reliability that our brand has come to represent.”
“The growth potential is huge-people are just starting to recognise the power that tablets can have in all aspects of work and home life,” said O’Neill.
Lines blur
Part of the appeal of the tablet is this blurring of the lines between the personal and the corporate. More and more people are living part of their lives online through e-mail, internet messaging and social networking, and it’s becoming increasingly common for them to use the same technology to facilitate both their personal and business lives.
According to those attempting to grapple with the consumerisation of IT, this is driving the appearance of consumer focused devices in the workplace.
“People no longer work exclusively in the office, nine to five and then go home. Now they work out of hours, on the weekends and at home. Sometimes they take weekdays off but still need to be accessible, or they travel and they need devices appropriate to those needs,” said Dockery of Microsoft.
“It’s becoming easier for the enterprise to offer that flexibility, and in general the adoption rate of new technology is getting faster and faster. 20 years ago, PCs in the workplace weren’t common and it took ages for them to be accepted. Today, kids are growing up with communications devices all around them, and if they see a new one that does something that appeals to them, they’re straight on it,” he said.
IT fit
A big question for IT departments confronted with executives who want to use their new tablet computer at work is how well do these devices integrate into the existing IT structure. Are they secure? Are they robust enough to handle the regulatory demands the enterprise is obliged to deal with? Are they locked into using proprietary operating systems and apps that may not be compatible with other IT infrastructure?
These are the questions that most seriously confront the expansion of tablets into the enterprise space, and they are the questions that tablet manufacturers are most keen to say they’ve got the answers for.
“If you’re security conscious and you manage and store your data back in the data centre, then you don’t have much to fear from tablets,” said Patrick Irwin, product marketing manager for Citrix Systems. “It shouldn’t matter what someone is connecting with-all you need is the right software and you can access a virtual desktop from any device.”
BYOC
Citrix has championed the Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) idea, whereby staff get their choice of access device subsidised. It offers desktop virtualisation software which is says is ideally placed to help integrate tablet PCs into a corporate network.
“It will run on Android devices, the Backberry PlayBook, the iPad and iPhone and other systems. This approach to integrating mobile computing allows the IT department to say yes to whatever device appears on the scene without having to worry too much as to what that device is.”
Irwin agrees that the consumerisation trend is at the heart of the tablet boom.
“A lot of the time the demand for access doesn’t come from the top down, or from the IT department, but through the end user. It’s driven by people saying ‘this is how I would prefer to work’. It comes from people buying devices that suit their lifestyle as well as their IT needs,” he said.
“The revolution that’s taking place in this space was kicked off by devices like the iPad and iPhone and it caught a lot of people by surprise-it’s difficult to argue against the tablet being the main thing driving ‘prosumer’ product development right now. Will that continue to be the case? It’s hard to say, but it’s hard to imagine the genie going back in the bottle now.”
OS wares
Each tablet vendor will happily argue the merits of their particular strengths. Microsoft, for example, is proud of the way its Windows 7 operating system runs on netbooks and tablets. This makes it ideally suited to integrating with the rest of the IT architecture in an enterprise setting, says Ronald Dockery.
“Part of the appeal of the tablet, particularly slates based on Windows 7, is that you can introduce them fairly easily. You don’t have to do anything wacky to get them to work with your Windows infrastructure-you don’t have to worry about patching and security in the same way you otherwise might. It’s not the same as trying to get an iPad or whatever to work with your existing windows estate.”
“If your network is built on enterprise proven architecture, then you probably don’t want to bodge together a fix to get foreign OS apps to work with what you’ve got.”
Microsoft argues that tablets running Windows 7 have several advantages over the competition-most notably in that they can run pretty much any existing enterprise software out there, and don’t need specialist apps to be created for them.
“There are quite a few devices out there that will work really well with Windows 7. They fit the enterprise space because they are easy to manage and have the horsepower to run enterprise class applications, and they’ve got the security part down-that doesn’t get talked about enough I think,” said Dockery.
“You could probably lose a slate more easily than you could a laptop, or damage one by dropping it from a height, so it’s important that a tablet PC is regularly backed up, fully secure and easily managed. That’s one of the things that separates the needs of the enterprise user from the consumer-the data is frequently worth much more than the hardware that it is used with.”
Little darlings
RIM argues that its Blackberry devices are already the darlings of the business world and that its recently launched Playbook tablet is simple to integrate into a business setting because when it comes to talking to the corporate network and back office infrastructure, it effectively functions like an overgrown smartphone.
“An organisation’s IT department is often under pressure to do ‘more with less,’ said O’Neill of RIM. “Our focus has always been on efficiency and the PlayBook has been designed with this in mind. Organisations will be able to use existing Blackberry infrastructure to help manage their PlayBook deployments, which will minimise their IT admin burden, ensuring quick and simple deployment and use.”
“The Blackberry tablet OS has been purpose-built for our tablet devices and the user experience really reflects that. The market for tablet devices is still young and still growing, but we aim to continue to help IT teams and technologists find a balance between control and freedom to allow these new devices to be managed in the workplace.”
For the corporate tablet user, applications are the name of the game, and it’s the availability of software that makes day to day tasks easier that makes a tablet much more than a plaything.
All about apps
“Business apps are extremely important,” said Manuel Linnig, personal systems group EMEA spokesperson for Hewlett Packard. “At the moment, there are still many more apps for consumers then for business users, but that’s changing.”
Linnig is currently working on HP’s proprietary WebOS, which the company acquired last year when it bought Palm Computing for $1.2 billion (EUR*824 million). HP says the system currently has around 6,000 apps available, compared to 350,000 for Apple’s iOS system, and 250,000 for Google’s Android OS.
“We’re working towards improving that, particularly with the app development community. One of the advantages of WebOS is that it’s relatively easy to port apps to this format. Just before we launched, we went to a gaming company to develop a game for us, and they were pretty much able to turn one around in a week.
HP announced in February that it would launch two new smartphones and a tablet based on WebOS this summer, and it aims to ramp up the number of apps it has available for these devices.
“Starting from scratch developing apps is a tricky proposition-you might be able to find a killer app just for your platform but it’s become harder and harder to do that-for example, ask yourself what is the killer application right now that one platform has and the others don’t? There isn’t really one,” said Linnig.
Conversion kicks
“It makes more sense to make sure that people can get access to the apps they want, and at the same time provide some new applications which are specific to the products and which take advantage of the technology. We just released the software development kit for our Touchpad and we will have platform development kits available soon which will make it possible to take an existing app and convert it to WebOS.”
“Using this kit, you can take any iOS or Android app and wrap the WebOS code around it-that cuts a lot of time out. For example, we were able to convert the game Angry Birds to WebOS in just two days. There’s no reason why the same couldn’t be done for business apps.”
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