51 Percent of CIOs Planning Tablet Deployments in 2011

Company-subsidized tablets may outnumber their employee-owned counterparts sooner than expected.

Morgan Stanley recently surveyed 50 enterprise CIOs about current and future tablet deployments and came back with some pretty astonishing findings: 21 percent of them are already purchasing tablets for employees and 51 percent expect to begin doing so in the coming year. In total, 67 percent of the CIOs surveyed said they’re either planning to deploy tablets or provide support for employee-owned ones this year. Now the scope of these deployments remains to be seen, but the fact that so many are being budgeted suggests the tablet is gaining meaningful traction in enterprise.

And if you’re dubious of that claim, consider this: Pads accounted for 29 percent of new enterprise activations of Good Technology software in December 2010, up from 25 percent the month prior. Clearly, there’s growing corporate interest in the tablet, which means there are growing opportunities for companies that provide enterprise software solutions for it–mobile security vendors like Check Point, desktop virtualization companies like VMware and cloud-based applications outfits like Salesforce.com.