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.
• 80% of IT organizations are supporting an increasing variety of smartphones and laptop PC models. We asked about the number of supported configurations for personal devices and PCs. 80% of firms responded that in the past two years and through 2012, they expected to support an increasing array of configurations.

The implications for vendor strategists are that personal devices, especially tablets, and Web-based applications for PCs are driving big changes in how IT organizations support and manage end user computing. Centralized device management will still matter in a world of that increasingly uses Web-based applications, and will expand to include a greater variety of devices. Hence Microsoft’s announcement this week that System Center Configuration Manager 2012 will manage Apple iOS and Android devices.