Enterprise Communications Featured Article

Many may not have expected Apple (News - Alert) to become the business tablet of choice.

Creative industries and the education sector have been the foundational markets for Apple since its beginnings, and the company has always left the business markets to others such as Microsoft and IBM. But that has changed with the mobile revolution, as evidenced by a new report from mobile management firm Good Technology (News - Alert).

Apple’s iPads accounted for 92 percent of tablet activations in the first three months of this year, according to research by Good Technology. This contrasts with IDC’s (News - Alert) research that iPads account for less than a third of overall tablet sales.

The takeaway: Apple dominates business tablet use.

The reason for this dominance is not hard to see. Businesses of all sizes have found creative ways to use tablet computers, from making them point-of-sale devices to mobile presentation units, kiosks and unified communications terminals. Tablets make sense for business, and Apple both invented the space and dominated it in its early days.

Ease of use and turnkey operation trump price point when it comes to the business use of tablets, so the iPad makes sense for business adoption. Early bring-your-own-device (BYOD) usage also favored the iPad, since most consumers in the first round of tablet adoption cut their teeth on some version of the Apple product.

Apple no longer is the only game in town when it comes to tablets, however, nor is it the clear winner in terms of functionality. And it certainly doesn’t win on price. This is reflected in the IDC numbers.

So is the iPad a business juggernaut or has it just benefitted from first mover advantage? As more Android and Microsoft (News - Alert) tablets enter the market, will we see the iPad become just one of many devices used in the enterprise?

My guess is that we will, but Apple will still dominate.

The BYOD trend is pushing the enterprise to adopt a flexible approach to device management as embodied by mobile device management (MDM). So there’s no reason that enterprises necessarily need to be using the iPad; any device will work, so there’s limited barrier to entry for these other tablets. Just because Apple made inroads first in the enterprise does not mean it has a sizeable long-term advantage in the space.

And while the first tablets brought into the workplace by employees were most likely of the Apple product line, that should be changing as cheaper, non-Apple alternatives mean that everyone can now have a tablet that they bring into work.

As tablets spread to every employee, more of these devices that make their way into an enterprise setting will be from non-Apple manufacturers.

But Apple probably still will retain a slight advantage for the simple reason that iPads are at the top of the heap when it comes to tablets, and the workers most likely to use them on a BYOD basis are executives and workers higher up in the chain of command. This group is most likely to lean on tablets, and it also is most likely to sport an Apple product.

So while Apple might not keep its massive lead in the enterprise, it might have finally become a legitimate enterprise computing provider.