At Mediafly, we have a unique perspective on media consumption. Between our private- and public-facing clients, we have seen a variety of mixed media consumption patterns through the years. Now that enterprise mobility has reached a feverish pace, we’ve helped clients with BYOD, CYOD / corporate-purchased smart devices, combinations therein, and teams who have fully embraced tablets for sales enablement purposes. Within many companies, tablets have truly accelerated the pace and perceived need for enterprise mobility to be implemented ASAP. As we mentioned last year, our past private trend predictions were fairly accurate. For 2012, we went on a limb and made some of our predictions public.
Let’s see how we did for 2012 and then delve into what we see for 2013.
Yea or Nay? Yea: In our experiences, iPad does continue to dominate the enterprise tablet scene. Nay: We have not seen Android make significant inroads yet, although Windows 8 could have something to say about enterprise penetration. However, that’s something for 2013 predictions…
Yea or Nay? Yea: from the enterprises purchasing tablets, the sales and executive teams continue to be the first in line. As enterprise mobility spreads throughout the workforce, such as to field support teams, creative teams, and beyond, this trend will likely dissipate.
Yea or Nay? Mixed. We have seen salespeople completely stop carrying their laptops and briefcases once they have Mediafly’s SalesKit sales enablement solution. At the same time, many people still carry laptops, as they prefer to create files via traditional computers.
Yea or Nay? Yea: IT staff and even sales and marketing teams have turned to outside solutions, whether cloud-based SaaS platforms like Mediafly, or otherwise. The quality and reliability of enterprise software solutions continues to improve and evolve, making a decision to go with a vendor-supported app solution relatively painless. This allows internal IT staff to focus on core competencies and differentiation where it matters.
Yea or Nay? Yea: As mentioned above, functionality and options continue to increase in enterprise software. The redundancy and scalability of cloud-based solutions, not to mention the affordable nature, really have put them in the forefront of enterprise upgrades. Vendors are learning from the outages of the past and maximizing uptime. As an example of decreasing costs, Amazon just reduced pricing, e.g. dropping S3 pricing by 24-27% for all regions.
Yea or Nay? Nay. Google only fixed HTTP Live Streaming in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. At the time of this writing, Android 4.0+ devices account for only 34.2% of the Android ecosystem.
To make matters worse, Adobe took what was a fledgling Live streaming environment on Android (using Flash Player) and drove a knife through it by deciding to stop support Adobe Flash Player on Android.
Yea or Nay? Yea. Native apps continue to dominate consumer, enterprise and media attention. Furthermore, the pace of innovation for pure browser-based HTML5 apps is severely limited by cross-browser issues and OS limitations. Consumer-focused apps that have unified user interface requirements continue to move away from HTML5.
Now, on to 2013 and a new year of predictions:
1) iPad continues to dominate the enterprise. The Apple iPad, even though some initially dismissed it as a consumer toy, has become the de facto standard at the present time for corporate deployments. We see this in sales reports as well as our own enterprise engagements. We believe the iPad will continue this dominance through 2013
2) Windows 8 will eclipse Android in the enterprise. The Windows 8 tablets have been widely anticipated. While the initial launch didn’t break records, there are many enterprises have held out tablet adoption pending a legitimate Windows entry into the tablet space. As mentioned above, Android has not made significant enterprise inroads at the present, and we don’t see it competing well for the non-Apple crowd vs. the enterprise favorite, Microsoft.
3) As we predicted last year, salespeople and executives will continue to be the first to receive corporate tablets. However, sales enablement and executive review will no longer be enough and tablets will migrate to more departments throughout the enterprise. Field service professionals, creative teams, engineers, and more will embrace tablets in daily workflow and increase the enterprise penetration of tablets.
4) In a significant usage shift, file creation on tablets will become more widespread in 2013. Since they were brought out, tablets have been used primarily as a consumption device- for viewing or experiencing content – versus one used for the creation of enterprise files and documents. However, with native Microsoft Office applications for Windows 8 tablets and rumored iOS and Android versions nearing the release, the world’s most-used office suite will soon be available for corporate productivity. In addition, more tablet productivity applications are embracing document creation and modification capabilities, including devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note series, making tablets closer substitutes for PCs.
5) For new enterprise equipment, sales of tablets will significantly outpace the sales of laptops in 2013. With the increase in functionality outlined above and the availability of decent accessory keyboards (for a more traditional experience), tablets are a more powerful option than ever. In fact, they have now become a viable option for corporate users instead of, not just in addition to, laptops.
6) While hybrid HTML5-native apps lose traction for consumer apps (e.g. Facebook), they continue to gain for enterprise apps. We firmly believe that hybrid HTML5-native apps will be the platform of choice in the future. The cost of creating beautiful, responsive user interfaces is dramatically less expensive and more maintainable than building pure iOS and Android native apps. The only real question is “when”, not “if”. It may not be 2013, but 2014 is feeling pretty good.
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