It is tough to ignore the drumbeat of good Apple news in the past two weeks. The newly released iPad 3 sold (and that is sold/not shipped) over 3 million units in the space of 4 days. The stock price briefly flirted with $600.00 (we are talking almost Berkshire Hathaway here) and all the finance channels could do was speculate about was how Apple was going to distribute the incredible pile of cash it was sitting on.
Lost in all of this was a recent survey by ChangeWave that found nearly 1/3 of the surveyed planned to buy tablets in the 2nd quarter (2012) and will use them as replacements for PCs for at least some users. On top of that, 84% of those companies who are planning to buy tablets state they plan to purchase iPads – a 7% increase over the previous survey (and this survey was taken before the iPad 3 release).
It is not secret that there is a growing demand for mobile solutions in the enterprise but the survey puts that interest into perspective in that business interest in the iPad is increasing. Now, if 1/3 of businesses are looking at the iPad for PC replacement (whether that be laptop/netbook or desktop), that means that 2/3 are looking to use the iPad to support a specific application rollout whether that be sales automation, support for a firm’s field force, or just a base platform to distribute a group of business-specific applications.
It will be interesting to see whether firms choose to invest in platform-specific iOS developers to build native applications due to requirements around:
• Has to work offline (due to bad coverage at some destinations, use WiFi-only tablets to save on cost of device and cellphone company data plan charges)
• Capacity of a native app to store large amounts of information (such as sales multi-media or product documentation)
• Standardize on iPads (and to a lesser extent iPhones) just as firms standardized on RIM Blackberry a number of years ago
or use existing website developers to build hybrid apps to support multiple platforms (PhoneGap, Titanium, etc) or move in a third direction and invest in a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) such as IBM Worklight or Verivo Software (formally Pyxis Mobile). In any case, it is a good time to be a mobile-saavy developer.
