Businesses find a use for the iPad
Many businesses are buying iPads for their employees, saying that it fills a niche not covered by desktop or laptop computers.
A shopper fiddles around with an iPad at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP/File
The big question in the minds of many when Apple launched the iPad tablet computer in April was whether this new device was destined to be only a high-tech toy or if it had the horsepower to become a valuable business tool. It didn鈥檛 take small business owners long to answer that question in the iPad鈥檚 favor and make room for it at the table.
Many organizations are adding to their computing mix to augment desktop and laptop computers. Scale Computing, a 50-person company that develops and manufactures for small businesses, has rolled out iPads to nearly 70 percent of its employees, including the entire sales staff, executive team and marketing team.
鈥淲e love it,鈥� said Peter Fuller, a founding member and VP of marketing and business development. 鈥淚t鈥檚 just a terrific presentation tool as well as a medium consumption tool.鈥�
Fuller added that Scale is using iPads to augment laptops. []
鈥淚t allows folks to travel more lightly,鈥� he said. He recently took a trip to London and brought along his iPad instead of his laptop because of its light weight and long battery life. 鈥淭he iPad has become my backup system. It鈥檚 basically a second computer.鈥�
iPad shortcomings
There are , however, Fuller concedes, particularly the lack of local storage and Flash support. Daniel O鈥橪eary, a vice president with LincWare, a company based in Rochester, N.Y., that makes software to automate document creation, agrees that the lack of local storage could be a deal-breaker for companies. He also takes the iPad to task for its lack of camera, but is confident that future iterations of the iPad and its software will address many current complaints. But none of these flaws has tempered his enthusiasm for the device.
鈥淲e initially purchased one for software development purposes, but it鈥檚 a device that we鈥檝e all fallen in love with,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 fun to use, insanely portable and priced low enough that we can invest in a few and not feel guilty.鈥�
The company has 500 on order for its own use and for distribution to customers, O鈥橪eary said. 鈥淲e鈥檙e definitely keeping Steve Jobs in business.鈥�
LincWare users take notes at meetings with the Evernote application and attend meetings using the GoToMeeting application.
鈥淔or workshops and presentations, we demonstrate our application called LincDoc on the iPad, which really blows customers away,鈥� he said.
22squared, a 260-person marketing agency with offices in Atlanta and Tampa, is looking at iPads as replacements for its laptops. The company is currently using nine with six more on order. 22squared has been using iPads since they were introduced, said Robert Isherwood, the agency鈥檚 chief technology officer. Mobility and the device鈥檚 ability to foster collaboration are the iPad鈥檚 strong points.
鈥淲e鈥檙e using our iPads for collaboration while in meetings and while on the road,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he adoption path at 22squared was smoothed by the agency鈥檚 extensive experience with the iPhone, Isherwood said. They鈥檙e now exploring the use of iPads as phones through the Cisco Mobile 8 application and using Citrix XenApp to let them take their back-office tools and applications on the road.
鈥淭hese two utilizations would make iPads a very real business application,鈥� he said.
Media machine
The most-used applications at 22squared include Flipboard, which takes Facebook and Twitter feeds to create an interactive magazine, iThoughts mind-mapping software, the NetNewsWire RSS reader and Stumbleupon, a discovery tool and social recommendation service that aggregates links to articles from around the web that readers might be interested in.
Other are Instapaper and Evernote for clipping articles for future reading, AirSharing for wireless access to files on your own computer, Apple鈥檚 iWork suite and Roambi for data visualization.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of usage that鈥檚 about media consumption,鈥� Isherwood said. 鈥淭he collaboration aspect is coming and growing.鈥�
Isherwood said he has never heard complaints about the absence of a physical keyboard. His key wish is for Apple to take the enterprise market more seriously, particularly in terms of purchasing and support.
鈥淓mbracing the enterprise would really help the business market embrace Apple,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he is a fantastic device, a brilliant design. The iPhone and even more the iPad are great examples of easily accessible, human-scaled technology. We鈥檙e excited to see what the application development community will bring out.鈥�