iPad In Enterprise: IT Folks Can Have One Too

Ever since iPad has been released by Apple, there are discussions on whether iPad is an enterprise material or not. However, we are seeing increased iPad adoption in many organizations including some big enterprise players. However, there is another trend slowly shaping up without much media fanfare. Slowly, there are tools available for IT folks managing an organization’s cloud infrastructure, making iPad even more palatable for enterprises.

One of the well publicized iPad deployments on a large scale is the Florida State College story.

Rennie has put 350 iPads in the hands of executives, IT staff, administrators, faculty and students—all using the iPads in various ways depending on job function. It’s the first phase of a project calling for a thousand iPads to be delivered throughout the college by the end of the year, including at libraries and labs where students can “check” them out.

But there are more than 50 schools and colleges (Spreadsheet by Eric Lai of ZDNet) with widespread iPad deployments. Clearly, iPad is proving to be a valuable tool in the education sector.

Enterprise adoption also picked up steam with some big name companies like Mercedes-Benz, Wells Fargo, SAP, etc. buying iPads for their internal use. According to Jason Hiner of ZDNet, a chunk of the initial iPad sales came from these companies.

Bloomberg reported that Wells Fargo, Mercedes-Benz, and SAP are among the enterprises buying iPads. Forrester analyst Ted Schadler said, “This iPad thing has taken the world by storm. It came in as a consumer product and very quickly the people who actually bought them were business people.”

Dan Shey, director for enterprise at ABI Research, said, “A lot of businesses right now are in experimentation with these devices.”

This just a tip of the iceberg and according to Eric Lai of ZDNet, SAP is planning to deploy 17,000 iPads in the next 12 months

The news that SAP AG has already deployed iPads to 1,000 lucky-duck employees, made a big splash over the American Labor Day weekend (see Twitter).

Turns out that doesn’t even begin to encompass the ambitions of my parent company (if you hadn’t heard, Sybase was bought by SAP last month).

SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann told Computing magazine today that the company could have as many as 17,000 iPads running inside SAP within 12 months.

There are more than 20 enterprises (spreadsheet courtesy Eric Lai of ZDNet) with iPad deployment including MicroStrategy which deployed 1100 iPads to their sales people and executives in the recent months.

We will soon see another group of employees inside the enterprises who will need iPads sooner than later. They are the folks in IT responsible for managing the enterprise cloud infrastructure. There are many IT tools available on both iPhone and iPad. However, many IT folks find iPad to be more suited for their needs due to its convenient form factor. There are already many iPad apps to manage cloud infrastructure services. Some of them are

iAWSManager for AWS EC2, Simple Database, SQS, S3, etc.
AWS Watch lets you manage Amazon Cloud Watch through iPad
Rackspace Cloud Pro for managing Rackspace cloud services through iPad
Soon to be released Openstack iPad app which will let IT admins manage the compute and storage infrastructure running on Openstack

Morphlabs (See previous CloudAve coverage) added their own app to the list of apps suitable for IT in any organization using cloud based services on friday. With Morphlabs mCloud Mobile, users can easily virtualize hardware and automatically configure VMs, simplify system administration, simplify application management, manage billing, etc. from the iPad. This will come handy for organizations deploying mCloud on their datacenters.

With more and more cloud vendors offering their management console as iPad app, it is just a matter of time before members of IT walk around with an iPad. There are some security concerns but I think they will find a way to increase enterprise adoption. Apple may soon realize the potential of enterprise market and come up with a more enterprise friendly iOS.