According to Gartner, the top 10 commercial business application categories for tablet devices include:
- Sales automation systems for customer collateral, sales presentations, and ordering systems
- Business intelligence: analytical and performance applications with management dashboards
- Containerised email to separate corporate messaging environments from personal email
- Collaboration applications for meetings
- File utilities for sharing and document distribution
- General corporate/government enterprise applications for CRM, ERP, SCM and messaging
- Medical support systems for doctors, nurses, and physical therapists
- Hosted virtual desktop agents to provide secure remote operations of traditional desktop applications and environments
- Social networking applications with intelligent business insight
- Board books for secure document and report distribution
According to Gartner’s latest forecast, worldwide media tablet sales to end users will total 63.6 million units in 2011, a 261.4 percent increase from 2010 sales of 17.6 million units. Media tablet sales will continue to experience strong growth through to the end of 2015 when sales are forecast to reach 326.3 million units.
“By 2016, more than 900 million tablets will be in the hands of users,” said Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst David Willis. “As more consumers buy them, they then tend to bring them to the workplace and use them for their jobs – often led by executives.
Combined sales of tablets and smartphones will be 44 percent bigger than the PC market in 2011, according to Gartner predictions. By the end of 2014, the installed base of devices based on new lightweight mobile operating systems like Apple iOS, Google Android and Microsoft Windows 8 will exceed the total installed base of all PC based systems.
