70 pc of Indian SMBs prefer tablets to PCs

KOLKATA, INDIA: In the immediate future, India small and medium businesses indicate a rapid anticipated growth trend for tablet acquisition.

A deep-dive analysis of the India SMB expenditure on these devices shows that small businesses are the major contributors to this accelerated spending, outpacing their medium business counterparts.

Moreover, total tablet penetration is projected to increase dramatically within India SMBs over the next three years.

Nearly two thirds of PC-owning SMBs in India have stated plans to purchase one or more tablets in the next 12 months according to soon-to-be-published "2013 India SMB Mobility Landscape, Opportunity Assessment & Outlook" study conducted by New York-based AMI-Partners.

AMI research indicates that more than six in ten tablet-owning SMBs would like to utilize keyboards and other add-on devices. A similar proportion of these SMBs have realized the enhanced need for data security and access control.

There is no doubt that the need to access and work on files/documents on the move via cloud applications has been a significant growth driver for tablet usage. When considering key business applications, India SMBs tend to utilize tablets for productivity suite applications - viewing and editing documents on the go, said the report.

Highlighting on the AMI distribution of tablet operating systems as a part of its study Dev Chakravarty, research manager, AMI-Partners India said, "Research reveals that Android is the most dominant OS among India SMB tablets at present. Apple iOS and Blackberry OS follow far behind."

"Apple has been more consumer-centric in the India market, although it has shown an increased acceptance in its bid to become one of the market leaders. Over 40 percent of firms planning to purchase tablets are considering iPads next year," added Chakravarty.

The report further added that on a personal level, tablets are used to connect to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

As expected, when comparing tablet applications usage by India SBs versus MBs, MBs are significantly greater users of these applications, the report added.