Tablets, Not Laptops, Are The Future Of BYOD

Forget working on your smartphone or laptop – the office of the future will be tablet-based, at least according to new research from analyst firm Gartner.

The firm examined the mobility strategies of 135 IT and business leaders over the first quarter of 2014 and found that tablet BYOD programmes offer better opportunities than enterprise-owned laptops, smartphones and tablets- and that IT departments can actually support nearly three times more users in tablet BYOD in programmes than in enterprise-owned tablet programmes.

While IT leaders can spend half a million dollars to buy and support 1,000 enterprise-owned tablets, Gartner says that they can support over 2,745 user-owned tablets with the same budget.

Efficient

“Without a stipend, direct costs of user-owned tablets are 64 percent lower,” said Federica Troni, research director at Gartner, “When organisations have several users who want a tablet as a device of convenience, offering a BYOD option is the best alternative to limit cost and broaden access.”

Overall, Gartner predicted that employee-owned devices will outnumber enterprise-owned devices two to one in the workplace by 2018, when 90 percent of organisations will support some aspect of BYOD working, with tablets being a popular choice.

“When organisations have several users who want a tablet as a device of convenience, offering a BYOD option is the best alternative to limit cost and broaden access,” Troni added.

Tablets are already a familiar presence in many UK businesses thanks to the flexibility they provide, with recent research also showing that nearly three quarters of UK businesses offer tablets as part of their IT device offering, with Android-powered devices proving the most popular.

The findings from Dell found that introducing tablets into the workplace has seen a major boost in productivity for businesses, with over half of respondents saying they’d seen at least a 20 percent boost thanks to the devices.

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