We’re coming up on the third anniversary of Apple’s release of the iPad, and looking back, one of the bigger surprises about it has been its strength in the enterprise. As CEO Tim Cook points out nearly every time he speaks in public, most companies in the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying the iPad for use by their employees. And numerous enterprise software companies, among them SAP and Oracle. And numerous cloud software companies — Salesforce.com, Workday and NetSuite, to name only three — all support it.
But is that a permanent state of affairs? There is at least one analyst who has decided that it isn’t. Patrick Moorhead — a former executive with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices who now runs his own research shop called Moor Insights and Strategy — has published a new white paper arguing that if ever there was a moment when the iPad’s dominance in the enterprise might face a challenge, it’s now.