The Rise of the Tablet: How It Affects IT Organizations… and You
Tablet computers popularity skyrockets. Devices like Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, ASUS Eee Pad, BlackBerry Playbook and more not only change our life-style, the way we consume content and interact with each other; they also blur the line – and sometimes completely break the boundaries – between our personal and professional worlds, to completely change the way we live. In essence, the tablet is the first, single device that addresses one’s personal AND professional needs – so you might find yourself looking at an end-of-quarter CRM report and a minute after wish your mom happy birthday via email.
According to International Telecommunication Union (ITU), there will be expectedly over 5 billion mobile subscribers till the end of 2010. These subscribers use cellular phones (where about 1/5 of them use smartphones), which evolutionarily provided more bandwidth capacity, more mobile services and more applications – and no doubt they still deliver incredible value to end-users. But after all, the laptop – which is the prime electronic device used for business/professional purposes – was always kept on a separate device. The interesting thing about tablet computers is that they provide both capabilities – the “personal” features (surfing the Internet, running applications, playing games, even emailing, etc.) AND the “professional” features (reading and editing documents, accessing business-critical applications, approving procedures, filling out corporate forms, and more).
From a business angle, more and more employees who used to work in the company headquarters or branch offices, now work someplace other than their office and spend a major share of their time on the road. As a result, the IT needs to support a workforce which is more mobile than ever. This means being able to support a variety of device types (smartphones, laptops and now also tablets) – where sometimes the very same employee uses two (or three) different devices, for example – and I’m not making this up! – a laptop, a blackberry and a tablet. In addition, application usage model has also changed, where in addition to the “traditional” applications (web, email, instant messaging), latency-sensitive applications – such as video conferencing, VoIP, etc. – are being used. Consequently, IT personnel must leverage mobile application acceleration and optimization solutions that will ensure that the right, optimized content will reach the specific end-user device to keep employee productivity high at all times.
But there’s more. Think of a situation in which an employee uses his tablet by connecting to the corporate’s Wi-Fi network. That means that the business IT now faces increased traffic rate which is the result of both the professional and personal traffic coming from the employee. Now, think what is the impact of your next big customer’s executive delegation visit next week – how will that affect the IT organization? The result: It is certainly not enough for today’s IT organizations to be able to cope with increased traffic rates; it must leverage intelligent classification engines, rate shaping and sometimes even traffic steering techniques in order to give the right priority to each traffic type to ensure high SLA – be it driven by a personal or professional need.
Until next time,
Nir