It's an uphill climb for iPad rivals: Forrester

By SiliconIndia

Bangalore: When Apple's iPad was launched, it created an uproar in the market. The success story of iPad led many others to jump into the tablet bandwagon. However here is a piece of advice for the iPad competitors from Forrester. Ted Schadler, Analyst, Forrester says that its a tough road ahead for them to woo the enterprise customers, who like to carry their own products to work.

Many of the companies that are launching tablets will sell the products directly to the enterprises and not to the consumers. Schadler believes that the reason why iPad has had phenomenal success with the enterprise consumer is because it sold directly to the people and not the companies.

With companies like Cisco, HP, RIM bringing their own tablets specially for the enterprises, IT companies will face a tough task to decide on which brand of tablet to adopt. Here also iPad has all chances of scoring big. The reason for this is tablets are meant to serve the dual purpose entertainment and work. However the enterprise tablets from the above said companies will lose their edge of security, application control, and control over the data plan, if they are supposed to entertain. So the whole purpose is lost.

Another advantage for iPad is that it is one year ahead in its release and has innumerable accessories and apps to its name, something that the new entrants will need time to make up for. And most importantly, the tablets are competing with the iPad version 1.0, when the iPad 2.0 is in the offing.

These factors just make the case of the iPad rivals from bad to worse. Enterprise adoption for these tablets will be a difficult one while for the iPad it will be a cakewalk.

Irrespective of which tablet PC wins the race, the sure shot fact here is that the tablets are here and the market is set to expand. Forrester research reveals that the market for tablets in U.S. alone will reach the number of 82 million by 2015. You can do the math for the rest of the world!