iPads to Outnumber BlackBerrys in the Office by 2014

The BlackBerry’s days as enterprise’s sidearm of choice are numbered. Thanks to the consumerization of IT, there will soon be more iPads in the business market than RIM’s once ubiquitous handset.

Speaking at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Monday morning, Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research at Gartner, predicted that iPads will outnumber BlackBerrys in enterprise by 2014. “Tablets will continue to shake up the business world,” Sondergaard said. “In less than two years, iPads will be more common in business than Blackberries. Some CIOs are now placing orders for tens of thousands of iPads at a time.”

If that comes as a surprise, it really shouldn’t. Now that the iPad meets many enterprise-level security requirements and supports the mobile device management solutions that businesses often demand, more companies are embracing “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) programs that allow their employees to use the gadgets they use at home in the workplace as well. So, too, are more companies making the iPad standard issue hardware for their employees. SAP, for example, currently manages about 18,000 iPads. According to Sondergaard, large deployments like that will become increasingly common in the years ahead.

“Just two years from now, 20 percent of sales organizations will use tablets as the primary mobile platform for their field sales force,” Sondergaard said. “And by 2018, 70 percent of mobile workers will use a tablet or a hybrid device that has ‘tablet like’ characteristics.”