Use of Enterprise iPad on the rise in India

An Accenture study claimed nearly 10 per cent of the respondents owned a tablet PC. Another innovation firm, TBR said the tablet would replace the secondary PCs of many consumers nevertheless asserted that the market would ultimately support all three device styles — the laptop, tablet and smartphone — for computing and connectivity.

With 40 per cent of Indian consumers expected to spend anywhere between Rs 20,000 and Rs 70,000 on electronics in 2011, Vishal Tripathi, principal technology analyst, Gartner, says tablet PCs in India will find it easy to reach consumers who are looking for a second PC. "Indian enterprises take a longer cycle to move to devices like tablet PCs and during a few are beginning to warm up to devices like Samsung Galaxy Tab and Apple iPad, the number remains dismally low today," he adds.

SAP, a leading provider of business software solutions, has been using 200-odd iPads in its India office and plans to increase the uptake furthermore in 2011. SAP India COO Alok Goyal says: "From SAP’s 5,000-odd development teams to sales staff and senior management, tablet PCs will be given to everyone in the nearly future." The company has globally deployed about 2,500 iPads for its workforce. He said SAP but had a growing market for apps meant for the tablet PC platform. "Be it Apple’s iOS or Android or upcoming tablet platforms, we are developing business applications for each platform that can be used by enterprises across the globe," Goyal adds.

Leading hospitals in New Delhi and Mumbai are as well reported to be testing tablet PCs for doctors, as the device works on "store and forward" approach that can be taken wherever needed and later docked to the network to update patient information.

While hospital managements refused to divulge more details, sources in a New Delhi-based hospital claimed: "The iPhone has already changed the face of healthcare. The momentum that started with consumer applications has moved to forward-looking doctors and health service providers. We know it is becoming a common practice among senior doctors and nurses to carry a hospital-issued BlackBerry and personally-purchased iPhones."

The medical category today is already the highest-aggregate-priced category on the Apple App Store. The iPhone-to-tablet combination may as then be the biggest reason to make iPad successful in India’s clinical community.

Android, Google’s operating system, is as well making its way on to tablet PCs like Samsung Galaxy Tab, however, users argue, the platform was designed for smartphones and is but to evolve as a tablet PC platform.

Meanwhile, Apple made it clear that it saw the iPad as a potential business tool when it released Office-compatible iWork productivity suite for the multitouch device. Nevertheless, that was only the beginning for Apple’s enterprise push. It is expected that future software updates will allow direct network printing from iPad apps, as so then as support for accessing shared files from a local file server.

Gagandeep Singh Sapra, owner of System3 Group, bought about 25 Apple iPads for his colleagues. "When iPad launch was announced in the US, we stood in the queue to get our tablets PCs." He does not think iPads are going to replace laptops at work, however says: "iPads are great second PCs, especially when you have to meet customers or check your spreadsheets on the move. We have an app on the iPad that allows viewing work-related documents and even exchange data with one another securely, as we don’t have to store anything on the device." Sapra uses cloud-based services at work that can be accessed by custom-built apps.