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Tim Renowden, Analyst - Devices and Platforms, Ovum
The Apple iPad's arrival, heralded by unprecedented levels of media hype, has divided opinion, but there is agreement across the telecoms, media, and software industries that the form factor deserves close attention.
Media companies, in particular, are looking hopefully at the iPad as a new consumption platform, tool kit, and set of distribution channels for content, in the expectation that it provides a much-needed boost to their revenues.
The iPad has generated significant attention from magazine and news print publishers hoping to leverage the device's combination of desirable hardware, controlled content delivery channels, the maturity of the iTunes Store billing platform, and a deeply engaged user base, to deliver and monetize their own content.
Publishers scramble for digital market
Newspapers and magazines, facing a crisis of declining circulation and advertising revenues, are scrambling to launch digital editions of their papers as iPad apps. As publishers move away from ad-funded-only digital models and experiment with charging for content, the iPad offers the opportunity to package media in application and digital edition form and differentiate the product from that available through the browser, where consumers have become conditioned to free access.The difficulty for publishers is that, even based on the most optimistic of analyst sales forecasts (and the potential for tablet devices for traditional media is covered extensively in Ovum's report Reformatting news and magazine media), the installed base of iPads in the market will take years to reach levels that are financially significant for large publishers.
After the hype of Apple's iPad launch to consumers in the first half of 2010, the big event of the second will be a chance for businesses in the Gulf to begin their scrutiny of the new tablet from Cisco, which has announced the Cius, a seven-inch tablet device for enterprise use.
Tablet hype increases worldwide
The relentless hype around consumer tablets and the 'consumerization' of the enterprise has naturally aroused interest among enterprise customers, whether from the perspective of IT managers worried about their employees bringing their own tablets to work and demanding support, or from CxOs wanting to deploy tablets to achieve business goals. Much of this hype has been generated by the iPad, with its thousands of apps and slick marketing. However, the weaknesses of iPads and Android tablets in the enterprise remain largely the same as always: security, manageability, and compatibility with key business applications have been patchy at best.Availability of applications is a serious problem: the developers who create small mobile apps, games, or content-based apps for distribution through app stores are not the same as those building large-scale, robust enterprise-grade business applications. The consumer app store model (cheap, semi-disposable apps) is not a good fit for enterprise applications. Managing the lifecycle of enterprise applications is a complicated and expensive undertaking, and not one that many enterprises are likely to meddle with for the sake of experimenting with immature and rapidly evolving new device form factors.
Launching into this mix of hype and hard-nosed reality, Cisco is positioning the Cius as a device that heavily leverages Cisco's existing suite of collaboration and communications tools, which are already deployed extensively around the world, enabling increased mobility without compromising existing business processes or requiring CIOs to 'bet the business'.
