Prediction: iPad's Biggest Market Will Be ERP

Pundits are debating the biggest market will be for the Apple iPad. Will it be games or e-reading? But we think the biggest market for the iPad will be enterprise/ERP, software, human resources, finance, and customer management systems like those sold by industry giants SAP and Oracle.

The enterprise applications market is ripe for change. User adoption and satisfaction rates are dismal; customers have spent multiple millions of dollars and don't use even a fraction of the functionality; IT departments end up being blamed. It's a crisis for the entire industry.

The underlying problem with the enterprise applications market is user interface. The paradigm of enterprise software is to sit immobile in front of a terminal and enter a lot of codes and data. But that's just not the way people work any more. That is like going back and using the old mainframes. That paradigm assumes that the business functions change very slowly, if at all, which is no longer true. Large organizations change rapidly now, and the old style of software isn't keeping up.

We've studied this problem over several years and believe the iPhone and iPad will become the catalysts for change in this market.

Here is what's happening in hospitals. Doctors and nurses are adopting the iPhone, voting with their feet, and now jumping on the iPad too. They're using these tools for significant daily work, real patient and medical data management. We realized that these are enterprise data entry problems they are solving. The mobile paradigm, the Apple design with it's effortless user interface, provides a new approach to computing on a corporate scale, with less detail and less micro-management of workflow, but with massive and enthusiastic user participation. It's a completely different way of looking at enterprise computing.

Will the big vendors like SAP and Oracle re-write their product lines to fit the iPad and other upcoming tablets? It's likely, because in doing so they will gain market share. In the past they converted from DOS to Windows-based and Windows to web-based. This will be the third big re-write, from web-based to mobile.