Seybold's Take: Tablets for serious business

Following the daily news stories surrounding tablets has been an interesting pursuit. This past week, Apple and AT&T announced they will be spending more time wooing corporations. To better appeal to enterprises, Apple will need to draw on and make the most of developers who understand the business market as opposed to the consumer space.

Obviously, this move toward enterprises was prompted by Research In Motion's recent pre-announcement of its RIM PlayBook, a 7-inch tablet with built-in WiFi and the ability to connect to a BlackBerry for wide-area wireless connectivity. RIM has built its success on catering to business and corporate users, and while it is making inroads into the consumer space, its PlayBook is clearly aimed at its primary installed base.

RIM's developers have been building business-based software for a long time and RIM understands the types of controls corporate IT staffs want for managing and troubleshooting their devices in the field. Now Apple and AT&T would like to get out ahead of the curve (no pun intended) and see if they can beat RIM at its own game.

This means that there are many opportunities for developers with both the iPad and the PlayBook, and for Android or Chrome tablets that will soon follow. Tablets are catching on and will be used for both business and consumer purposes. They are light, they have long battery life and great screens, and they have enough power to handle a variety of types of applications. Many developers and enterprises will be tempted to use tablets as terminals for cloud computing, but I am not sure many corporations are currently buying into this concept.

Most corporations still want their applications and data behind their own firewalls where they can keep them secure and make sure their field workers have the latest versions of the programs. Data is a valuable resource for corporations and they don't treat its access lightly. In some respects, this gives the PlayBook an advantage since RIM has extensive experience in providing tools for corporate IT departments that enable them to have access to all of their BlackBerrys, download new applications, update older ones, manage each device, and provide customer support for their mobility workforce.

News Patterns, which collects news articles from literally thousands of sources every day, is showing some interesting trends related to tablets and pent-up corporate demand. It tracks these news stories using a radar-like screen that displays relationships between topics. Business applications has been moving steadily toward the center of the radar screen, indicating the number of articles written about business applications is picking up, including several by CIOs lamenting the lack of business applications for today's tablets.

As Apple with a launched product and RIM with a pre-announcement of its tablet head for the corporate world, the company that helps its developers work on serious business applications will be the company that will win the major share of corporate and medium-size business customers. I am not completely sold on cloud computing, nonetheless, a mixture of behind the firewall applications and updated information from cloud-based sources makes a lot of sense. Suppose you have an application that tracks your travel, airline, hotel, and other arrangements, checks for updates in the background, and otherwise helps manage your trips. Now suppose this application was also capable of talking to your corporate system back-end and couple with your company's travel polices. If your flight is cancelled and the program goes out and finds other flights, it will only show one that meet your company's travel guidelines. Or you have to stay on the road a few days longer and need a hotel, only choices that meet corporate policy would be presented to you.

Or consider an application that would keep an eye on your calendar. Before each meeting, the application would go out and find the latest news, stock reports, and other items of interest about the company with which you will be meeting. Or one of my favorites is to track meetings in my calendar. If the meeting is off-site, the application would automatically show a "must leave by time." The application would update the departure time by looking at traffic on the route you will be traveling. There are hundreds of other ways of matching corporate information with information in the cloud or augmenting corporate data with information that can be found in the cloud.

Standalone business applications are and will continue to be in demand, but selecting which one to develop might be a little tricky. For example, today a number of device vendors and network operators seem to feel that wireless video conferencing is important. Perhaps this will be true in the consumer world, but when I look at business applications, I look at what is in use within corporations today that can be extended beyond the office via wireless to see if there is a market. At present, video conferencing for business is only lightly used, and while it gained some measure of success during this recession, it is a long way from being a must-have application, so I would not rush to build video conferencing applications at this point.

There are many opportunities for developing serious business products as well as fun consumer products. As tablets are evaluated by more enterprises, I believe the final decision will not necessary be which tablet is the best, but rather which tablet has the best business applications and the best software to manage a fleet of tablets in the field.

Andrew M. Seybold is an authority on technology and trends shaping the world of wireless mobility. A respected analyst, consultant, commentator, author and active participant in industry trade organizations, his views have influenced strategies and shaped initiatives for telecom, mobile computing and wireless industry leaders worldwide. On Oct. 5, 2010 at the CTIA Enterprise & Applications conference,  Seybold will lead the Andrew Seybold Wireless University seminar examining the elements of wireless now and into the future: technologies, devices, applications and content. For more information click here.