San Francisco: Apple, without much effort on its part, is making rapid headway in selling to corporations.
After years of being the also-ran to Microsoft in the workplace, Apple has seen its iPad become a standard business tool.
According to an IDG Connect survey, 51 per cent of managers with iPads say they "always" use the device at work, and another 40 per cent sometimes do. Seventy-nine per cent of the respondents use the iPad for business when outside the office.
Even as Amazon's Kindle Fire and other tablets play catch-up in the consumer market, the iPad faces little competition among corporations such as financial services and pharmaceutical firms.
"We haven't seen a single pharma deploy on anything but the iPad," said Matt Wallach, co-founder of Veeva Systems, a maker of sales software for drug companies. "I've seen a lot of devices come and go over the years. Nothing touches the speed of adoption of the iPad."
Microsoft and Intel have dominated the office technology market for three decades, accounting for almost all the personal computers on workers' desks.
The seeds for the "Wintel" hegemony were planted in 1981, when International Business Machines tapped the two companies to help create its first PC.
Microsoft and Intel have struggled in their efforts to compete with the iPad, though that may change later this year when a tablet-friendly version of Windows debuts.
Windows PCs also are under attack. While total PC shipments dropped 5.9 per cent in the fourth quarter, the Mac grew almost 21 per cent, according to Gartner.
