Posted by Paul Anderson
Gartner : cloud trend has boosted tablet sales
Gartner expects worldwide tablet shipments to grow by 53.4% i.e. 184 million units. This will be a straight blow to the sale of traditional PCs— predicted to be down by 11.2%. By mid 2014, the difference between traditional PCs and tablet shipments will be reduced to only 18,000 more PCs than tablets shipped.
Gartner has defined this trend as the growth of the ultramobile category — aka lightweight laptops and portables. In the words of one of its analysts – The need to “balance work and play” from a single device has risen up big – thanks to cloud technology ruling the roost. This inevitably has led to mobiles to step in and offer the combined functionality of managing work and leisure anytime anywhere.
To give you a better insight into the above trend, let’s go into the crux of the matter – understanding the detailed benefits of cloud technology that has boosted tablet sales.
TCS Cloud Study: TCS research analysts conducted a month long survey understanding the benefits that companies have gained from cloud technology. What they came up with was a conclusion categorized into two sections:
In Shifting Existing Apps to the Cloud, companies experienced:
·28% to 55% IT costs reduction (on average)
·34% to 60% better business consolidation.
·35% to 64% reductions to ramp IT resources up or down
·33% to 59% reduced downtime
·37% to 57% reduced time for application upgrading
·35% to 64% reductions in the number of patches
·34% to 66% increase in the number of analytic reports.
Image Source: TCS Cloud Study
In Launching New Apps in the Cloud, companies experienced:
·22% to 27% increase in the number of new business processes tested and launched
·31% to 32% increase in the number of new products or services tested and launched
·14% to 17% cycle time reduction to enter new markets with new products/services
·13% to 17% increased revenue from launching new, cloud-based products and services in existing markets.
Image Source: TCS Cloud Study
Explaining the context further, TCS cited examples of two companies that transformed its operations using the cloud technology. Here is a synopsis of each of their experience:
AOL Inc
A leader in opening the online world to the American public, today it is the sixth most heavily visited U.S. Website. With revenue of $2.4 billion, it experienced 106 million unique visitors in November 2011.
According to Michael Manos, senior vice president of technologies at AOL, in a time when online companies come and go, AOL held its position undeterred. Reason: AOL shifted strategies as the Web dynamics changed. And one of the major steps it took was the switch over to a cloud setup.
In the words of Manos – ‘’we had accumulated a vast amount of computers, storage, other computing devices and software over the time. What we realized was that working with the legacy systems can weigh down our process. It can add complexity to our technology operations that will make it difficult for us to be agile.
As a company, our objective was to continually adopt new web technologies while keeping IT infrastructure costs low. Hence, to reduce the IT costs, AOL embraced a private cloud infrastructure. It dramatically lowered the technology expenses of sales, marketing and customer service. Looking at the widespread benefits, 20% of AOL’s business applications have moved to cloud, and another 15% will shift by mid-year.’’
Telco
It has been one of the select few companies that have advocated cloud extensively. In the last two years, Telco has moved financial systems to its private cloud. Additionally, it plans to move human resource applications, customer records ordering and processing to cloud as well. In sum, presently having 30% of its applications to cloud, it plans to increase it to 80% by year-end.
Their objective is to reduce the need for dozens of data centers, they are currently having. Inevitably, it will help them achieve cost savings by $100 million to $200 million.
In the words of a Telco executive – ‘’the issue with us is not whether we will broadly adopt cloud computing or not; but rather how quickly we will do so. We believe cloud is something that is going to be game-changing. It’s going to become a way of life.’’
It won’t be wrong to say that Telco sees cloud as major external and internal investment that will enable them — sell new services to customers, reduce technology costs and standardize business processes and applications software.
In fact this is precisely why Telco has swiftly organized its IT architecture completely around cloud. The objective is to consolidate business units by standardizing on many fewer applications and letting them run on fewer but centrally managed data centers.
Final Thoughts
Having said this, it becomes pretty obvious why and how the mobile trend has come up. You can say every company agenda has become unambiguously clear – use the cloud to mobilize the workforces for business consolidation and collaboration. Consequently, majority of companies have replaced the traditional PCs with tablets in their offices. From sales, marketing, customer service reps to the management professionals, each of them are given a tablet for a 24X7 connectivity and execution of business functions. Plus, the elimination of IT costs and other expenses associated with legacy systems makes cloud a worthier investment.
Needless to say this has brought a much desired flexibility and cumulative benefit for organizations across the globe.
Also, turning the tables in the favor is affordable cloud development services and outburst of price decline in premium tablets. Propel of lower priced tablet hardware (like: Amazon Kindle Fire and Google Nexus) has strengthened overall tablet sales. Hence, small business entrepreneurs too are no longer behind the race. Without worry of budget, they are shifting existing apps to cloud/launching whole new cloud apps and making it accessible to their staff via the 7-inch device.
