Tablets are a red hot topic since the launch of Apple’s iPad more than a year ago. Tablets are the most visible aspect of a broader topic on the minds of vendor strategists – the consumerization of IT. Consumerization is defined variously as using personal devices for work, pay-per-use payment models, spending personal money for work-related cloud services, and employee self-provisioning of IT capacity outside the oversight of IT. In our annual Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2010, we asked IT infrastructure buyers responsible for supporting end user computing about a variety of topics related to consumerization of IT and learned that:

• The IT organizations in 26% of enterprises (firms with 1000 employees or more) were planning to implement or had implemented general purpose touchscreen tablets such as the Apple iPad. Of that total, 4% reported they’d already implemented, and 17% were already piloting by Q3, 2010, approximately 6 months after the launch of this brand new category. SMBs, firms with 999 employees or less, were lower at 18% planning or implemented.
• Only 2% of firms, large and small, reported implementing or piloting bring-your-own-PC models, despite several years of hype among the desktop virtualization software vendors about this model. We expect this PC deployment model to grow, but it’s not a broad trend yet.
• Firms are using more consumer-style Web applications on PCs, with 84% firms increasing their use of Web applications. But they’re not abandoning locally installed applications. 55% of firms are increasing or staying the same on their use of installed applications, while only 4% are seriously reducing use.