There has been plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting enterprises are taking up the iPad and even the iPhone - much to RIM's chagrin. Much of this, not surprisingly, has been driven by employee demand and companies’ realization that security is manageable on the Apple platform. "We really don't need to push the iPads, people know the benefits and are clamoring for them," says Steve Chong, manager of messaging at Union Bank in San Francisco. (via American Banker). The bank expects to widen its deployment of the iPad this year after a limited rollout to certain employees in 2010.
However, before marketers assume that a new front into the enterprise has been opened to them, they should consider the experience of KLA-Tencor (KLAC), a Silicon Valley semiconductor equipment maker, which set out to deploy iPads to all 5,400 of its employees after it posted strong quarterly returns. CIO Ashwin Ballal sums up the experience in CIO.com: "The whole euphoria of an iPad started, and we had to get into high gear," says CIO Ashwin Ballal, charged with the massive iPad rollout. "That's when my nightmare began."
The plan was for the iPad to tap into KLA-Tencor's network for e-mail, calendaring, contacts, Web apps and other purposes. Also sales and service technicians would be able to use the device to access data over a virtual desktop. Ballal enumerates the problems he encountered as he put this plan in motion: a help desk that would be inundated with an approximate 10,000 calls to get the device set up (assuming roughly two per employee) and shipping the device to its global locations. Ballal did some due diligence on the mobile vendors that offered self-help applications for his situation but found many of their promises lacking.
One bright spot, Ballal says, is that he already understood the security issues as the company had deployed the iPhone a few years ago and had much of that infrastructure in place. He did, though, add a desktop virtualization service to the mix, which is not necessary for iPad use in the corporate environment - but important for high-level security.
