Is your enterprise ready for desktop-class tablets? On September 9, Apple announced its iPad Pro, with a 12.9-inch diagonal screen, 10-hour battery life, magnetically attached keyboard, and stylus, along with enough power to run desktop-class applications from Microsoft and Adobe. Enterprises now have a choice between the very comparable Microsoft Surface Pro 3 and Apple’s top-of-the line iPad, which should be available in November.
As the desktop-class tablet category matures, it offers enterprise users new ways to integrate computing seamlessly into their workdays through more natural note-taking, document preparation and viewing, videoconferencing and other activities. Enterprise architects can play a key role in identifying opportunities to streamline business processes, gain insights through brilliant data visualizations, and collaborate using our senses of vision, touch, and hearing more fully.
On the other hand, this category also offers new opportunities for security breaches due to missing, compromised or surreptitiously observed devices. In addition, BYOD users with desktop-class tablets may well become more prevalent, resulting in demand for integrating these devices into corporate networks and provisioning them with versions of corporate productivity applications.
Now is the time for enterprise architects to prepare their organizations with policies, standards, architectures and implementation plans for desktop-class tablets. Today’s ungoverned technology, replete with clever workarounds for corporate controls, is tomorrow’s technical debt, but organizations that prepare themselves to innovate with desktop-class tablets will be best positioned to reap their benefits.
