Tablet usage among India SMBs will continue to skyrocket

INDIA: In the immediate future, Indian 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. These are a few highlights emerging from the soon-to-be-published “2013 India SMB Mobility Landscape, Opportunity Assessment & Outlook” study conducted by New York-based AMI-Partners.

India SMBs are indeed considering tablets an essential workplace companion. There are several components to the overall tablet spend. 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.

The need to access data while on the move is key for tablet users. Hence, a large majority (over three quarters) of India SMBs connect to the internet via their tablets through either Wi-Fi or some kind of data plan such as 3G. In turn, spending on tablet data plans will display high double-digit growth rates in the near future.

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. Other oft-used applications are online file storage, CRM, completing finance/accounting-related tasks, e-mail, messaging and accessing calendar and contact information.

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.