Why device strategies are shifting in enterprise mobility

While it took enterprise some taking used to before it began embracing Apple’s iPhone as a viable device for their employees, the iPad hasn’t had much a hill to climb at all.

In an article last month, the Wall Street Journal offered up the Chicago law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP as a perfect example of how quickly the sands have shifted when it comes to Apple’s products in the enterprise.

While it had actually banned employees from using the iPhone when it first came out, the firm preordered 10 iPads when it the device was released last April.

“We made sure that we knew as much about these devices as possible,” Michael Barnas, the firm’s director of application services told the Journal. The firm now has a team of more than 50 iPad-toting attorneys and it expects to begin replacing laptops with iPads next year.

Apple has also applauded enterprise customers for helping it sell more than three million iPads within 80 days of its launch. COO Tim Cook said that “very surprisingly” half of the Fortune 100 are testing or deploying iPads in their workforce.

“Everyone in IT is jumping on this one,” Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research, told the Journal. “Rather than wait for people to start complaining they’re saying why don’t we get a few of them in and see what they are good for.”

Once IT’s concerns are addressed over security and general compatibility with the organization’s objective when it comes to mobility can be proven, tablets provide a host of other more immediate benefits for enterprise. On average, iPads are less expensive than laptop computers and the device has also proven to even have a set of advantages over laptops in certain tasks.

Sean Chai, senior IT manager at Kaiser Permanente, said the health-care organization was skeptical that the iPhone could be a business tool when it came out three years ago. But by the time the iPad came around, the company was singing a different tune as it preordered a pair of the devices and began testing them in a 37,000-square-foot technology lab. Chai and his team have so far used the iPads to view medical images and access records.

“Apple didn’t design this for the health-care industry,” Chai told the Journal. “But it’s a tremendous form factor.”

Mobile enterprise is converging in a variety of forms on virtually every industry. The Nielsen Company noted another shift in enterprise mobility recently in a report about the demographics of mobile subscribers.

“With the continued expansion of smartphone ownership in the U.S. and the availability of more affordable devices, the market is opening up to a wider range of consumers,” the research firm concluded. “However, we continue to see similar demographic profiles for smartphone owners as we did a year ago. While smartphone usage is shifting from purely business use to both personal and business use, owners are still more than two times as likely to own a smartphone for business usage only.”

These changes are all coming together to unlock new potential for mobility in enterprise as the lines between consumer and business blur even more. Just as BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd. accounts much of its recent growth to consumer interest, Apple and the like are enjoying a notable boost from the enterprise.