How will employee-liable trend affect Cius, Flare, PlayBook uptake?
A year after announcing its enterprise-centric Cius tablet, Cisco is poised to finally make the Android-based, Wi-Fi-capable device available at the end of the month.
Later in the summer, the Cius — which integrates with Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (UCM) servers and applications — will be available from Cisco reseller Verizon Business sporting an external Verizon 4G hotspot connection. Subsequently, Verizon will ship the Cius with an embedded Verizon LTE/4G connection in early 2012, says Chris Kemmerer, director of mobility solutions for Verizon Business.
ANALYSIS: Cisco Cius is not a tablet
Verizon’s LTE network currently spans 100 markets, offering download speeds of 5Mbps to 12Mbps and upload speeds of 2Mbps to 5Mbps.
Sounds good. But a lot has happened in the past year, including consumer-grade tablets taking the enterprise by storm. As a result, IT departments are less involved in client-device purchasing decisions, as users are choosing their own devices and bringing them to work.
How likely are users to choose a Cius, even if it is conveniently set up with an enterprise-grade VPN, built-in app store, hint of mobility management and other capabilities that IT knows and loves? Not very. The same goes for other emerging business-grade tablets such as the Avaya Flare Desktop Video Device and, possibly, the RIM PlayBook.
The analyst community does believe there’s a niche market for the enterprise devices.
Paul DeBeasi, wireless and mobility research VP at Gartner, sees devices like the Cius succeeding in organizations where IT must maintain end-to-end control over user experiences and data, such as in hospitals and investment institutions.
“Cisco ‘is’ the network,” asserts DeBeasi. “And, increasingly, they are the server. They can tie the Cius in with the network for [quality of service] that is better than the consumer device. Of course, they will have to show better voice and video quality. [Otherwise,] the combination of [consumer] tablets and MDM will be good enough for many.”
Chris Hazelton, research director for mobile and wireless at The 451 Group, concedes that had the Cius shipped earlier, “it could have ridden some of that initial excitement” surrounding the influx of tablets into employees’ hands. However, his view is that “these are very early days for tablets.”
Research his company conducted in May showed that 41% of enterprises had less than 5% of their users running tablets.
Then again, enterprises might think that less than 5% of employees access the network with tablets but be way off base, depending on how well they are managing their mobile environments.
For example, “if they’re not effectively managing Exchange” mail servers, which allow access with just username and password via the ActiveSync protocol, “they may not know of other tablets out there,” acknowledges Hazelton.
