Apple’s iPad Wins Over Big Business

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CC-licensed. Thanks to Yutaka Tsutano on Flickr.
CC-licensed. Thanks to Yutaka Tsutano on Flickr.

A growing number of large US businesses are arming their employees with the iPad,  proving that the tablet computer’s usefulness goes way beyond keeping the kids quiet.

Recent corporate converts to the iPad include Wells Fargo, SAP and Telllabs.

“This iPad thing has taken the world by storm,”  Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. told Bloomberg.  “It came in as a consumer product and very quickly the people who actually bought them were business people.”

Here’s how these companies are using Apple’s new device:

  • Wells Fargo used two of its first shipment of 15 iPads to demonstrate financial products at an investors’ conference in May and has ordered more.
  • At SAP, it’s a top-down adoption: when Rob Enslin, SAP North America President has ditched his laptop and travels equipped with a Blackberry and an iPad.
  • Tellabs, which designs and manufactures telecommunications equipment for service providers, paired with SAP and Sybase for an iPad app to that would quickly approve customer orders.
  • Some 40 Mercedes Benz dealerships are testing the iPad program, which uses the company’s MB Advantage software. Sales staff can scroll through info on the latest offers, check rebates and start running the credit application while the customer sits in the Mercedes they are interested in buying.

“A lot of businesses right now are in experimentation with these devices,”  Dan Shey, practice director for enterprise at ABI Research in Oyster Bay, New York told Bloomberg.

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