In a few short years, tablets have quickly become a must-have for today’s professionals.
That’s the gist of Dell’s 2014 International Tablet survey of IT Decision Makers (ITDMs), conducted this past summer by Harris Poll. The market research group interviewed over 1,400 IT professionals in the U.S., the U.K., India, Japan, China, Brazil, France, Russia, UAE/Saudi Arabia, and South Africa.
The companies discovered that at a minimum, 90 percent of IT decision makers in all of the countries polled — with the sole exception of Japan with 83 percent — offer tablets to their workers, support them under bring your own device (BYOD) programs or are currently thinking about deploying computing slates for their organizations.
Mobile computing has redefined the workplace, asserted Neil Hand, vice president of Dell’s Tablet Group, in a statement. “How people work is changing – the days of going to a specific place to conduct business are fewer while more employees are on the move and require access to company information outside of the workplace,” he said.
U.S. businesses have quickly warmed to tablets because they help employees get more done, the study suggests. “Tablets are perceived to have increased productivity according to 81 percent of ITDMs, with a majority estimating a productivity increase of 20 percent or more due to tablet adoption,” stated the report.
In the U.S., IT workers (93 percent) are big proponents of tablet use. Tablets are also popular in sales and marketing departments (70 percent), among C-level executives (67 percent), business development (63 percent) and administrative (60 percent) personnel.
But don’t plan on tossing out those PCs just yet. “In a majority of [American] tablet-using companies, tablets are used as a companion device to laptops/desktops (75 percent), and smartphones (85 percent),” the study found.
Android is the mobile OS to beat, at least outside of the U.S. and Japan. Google’s mobile operating system (OS) is particularly popular in India (91 percent), China (79 percent) and in Brazil and Russia (both 87 percent).
Despite a late showing, Microsoft Windows is the most popular tablet OS in the U.S. among business users. In Japan, Apple’s iPad is number one with 69 percent.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
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