Tablet Computing Experiences Remarkable Growth

Trend 1: Tablet Computing Experiences Remarkable Growth

The Austin Convention Center (ACC) in Austin, Texas, lookedat tablets for several years, but ?the learning curve for the maintenance folkswas too high with previous kinds,? says Joe Gonzalez, the ACC?s IT servicesmanager. However, with a floor plan that covers six city blocks, a lot of timeand labor was lost accessing paperwork, so management realized that tablet PCswould be a worthwhile investment.

At the ACC, FileMaker was already the back-officeapplication, and the vendor?s FileMaker Go product allowed the center to gomobile. This enabled the center to put all show and booth paperwork directly inthe hands of each maintenance worker, sharply reducing trips to the centralservice desk?trips that take an average of 10 minutes.

?We gave our maintenance service workers 10 minutes oftraining and off they went,? Gonzalez recalls. He estimates that, from aninvestment in 15 tablets, the ACC is saving $50,000 to $60,000 a year ?just inlabor, just on the show floor.? The ACC expects to have 75 tablets by the endof 2012.

This is this kind of adoption curve that, when multiplied bythe millions, has made tablet computing the top business technology trend for2012. Half of midsize and larger organizations expect to increase theirinvestments in tablets at least moderately?significantly more than any othertechnology we asked about in our survey. (See the top four technologies inchart 1 above.) That?s remarkable growth for a technology that?s less than twoyears old in its current form. (The first tablets, introduced a decade ago,never took off.)

For more, read Baseline’s Top 10 Business Trends of 2012.