The iPad may be sweeping the enterprise market at this point, but a bevy of competitors are betting on that market as a way to differentiate their product offerings. And it's a good way to tell the industry they're not competing with the iPad, instead targeting the enterprise market more sharply than Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is.
HP's (NYSE: HPQ) webOS-based TouchPad is the latest to come to market. Although it's being sold in consumer outlets like Walmart, it's being touted as enterprise ready.
"We think there's a better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs," Richard Kerris, HP's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, said in an interview with The Loop. "This market is in its infancy and there is plenty of room for both of us [HP and Apple] to grow."
Last week Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced the Android-based Cius will be available July 31. The tablet is marketed as a collaboration business tablet designed to deliver virtual desktop integration with a range of Cisco collaboration and communication apps. It will come to market with a price point below $750, with integrated services that include Cisco's TelePresence, WebEx meeting applications, Quad social software and Jabber messaging.
Cisco is also introducing a developer platform for the Cius tablet called the AppHQ app ecosystem that is designed to enable IT folks to create, manage and deploy tablet apps within their enterprises.
Will the strategy work? Tablets are still nascent in the enterprise market as companies continue to test where they work best as a laptop replacement. Moreover, it doesn't appear that the consumerization trend applies too much to tablets at this point. In other words, unlike smartphones, workers aren't taking their own tablets into the workplace in droves. So there's a big opportunity for the corporate-liable tablet--a market that vendors like Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM), HP and Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) are quite familiar with.
Apple may be targeting the corporate market but it doesn't quite offer volume discounts or enterprise bundles. It is primarily playing off its rather large smartphone presence in the enterprise--thanks to the consumerization effect--and a massive head start in the tablet market.
Challengers to the iPad, however, remain at a disadvantage when it comes to the number of apps. Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android is struggling to attract tablet app developers. While the Android platform is growing exponentially in the smartphone world, the tablet world is a different story. Android 3.0, the version optimized for tablets and known as Honeycomb, has few apps built for it. The number remains in the low hundreds, compared with the more than 100,000 iPad apps.
Cisco appears to be banking on the fact that its introduction of a developer platform will help solve that problem. RIM is allowing Android apps to run on its QNX OS, while HP is wooing more webOS developers.
But these enterprise-focused tablet players may have to segment their products a bit deeper. Cisco appears to already be making inroads in the medical segment with the Cius. The company is targeting hospitals following a year's worth of beta development at Palomar Pomerado Health, in San Diego, as well as firms in the education and communications industries.
Palomar has deployed the Android 2.2 tablets to doctors, and even created an app for it--Medical Information, Anytime, Anywhere. The app allows physicians to access the health system's EMR, and to communicate with one another through both voice and video.
But it's the security functions that sold Orlando Portale, CIO for Palomar Pomerado Health, on the device. "We have Android devices already and all are consumer, but [they] don't run over the VPNs we need," Portale says. Cisco's appeal is its ability to lock down the devices, he told bloggers at 4dik.com. - Lynnette
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