Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Apple iPad Tablet. Enterprise ready? At least not yet!

Today Apple announced their ipad tablet. In my opinion its a device targeted to playback/display media (web, video, ebook) and gaming - leveraging its 10 inch screen, 1 Ghz processor, 3G and WiFi and integrated graphics controller. In addition the standard Apple office applications as iWork got demonstrated. Plus Apple presented a consumer oriented ECO-system with web-browsing, ebooks, e-newspaper and Games. Obviously a great product taking the ipod touch concept to a larger screen.

Lets compare this offering with the needs of Enterprise level collaboration.

My view on the requirements for enterprise:
1) Multiple real time sessions. Multitasking is key to the day to day work in the enterprise. Thus an enterprise class collaboration device needs to allow multiple simultaneous activities in real time. For example i need to be able to talk to my assistant at the same time i am on a conference call with a supplier.
2) Supporting all media used in collaboration at the same time. Look at what i am doing now: on a conference call, having a 2 way video chat with my industrial designer talking about Apple's announcment, using webconferencing to show him screen shots from the web taken during Steve Job's presentation, following the Steve Job's presentation on twitter, having an IM conversation in parallel to update my boss on the Apple announcment and guess what - typing this blog.
3) Integration with the corporate data infrastructure.

My opinion: Apple ipad is a great consumer device. For an Enterprise level collaboration device one needs a dedicated multisession real time Software with the functionalities above. Plus you need to have sufficient horsepower to do all this at the same time - with high likelyhood too much for a 1 GHz CPU.
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