Cisco's Cius tablet was the hot news last week, and it looks like just about everyone in the mobility space is going to have a tablet before long.
When HP closed its Palm acquisition last week, eWeek ferreted out a bit of news from the otherwise-unremarkable event: Confirmation that HP will be coming out with a tablet based on Palm's WebOS. This is a move that our friend and contributor Dave Michels predicted over at his own blog, Pin Drop Soup, right after the HP-Palm deal was announced.
Then there was this: After the Cius announcement, there was some talk about RIM and its potential tablet announcements, but this blog was the only place where I saw the RIM tablet talked about as a reality, something about which concrete information existed and which was likely to be announced relatively soon.
If you want a great overview of the issues around enterprise tablets, definitely check out Marty Parker's contribution here. Among many other great insights, Marty brings up an issue I haven't seen raised anywhere else: Wireless LAN bandwidth usage.
If, as Zeus and others suggested, the Cius is targeted at vertical industries, the WiFi connectivity will be critical. And if it's meant to be a mobile telepresence endpoint, guess what--each Cius is going to suck up a lot of WiFi bandwidth. So an 802.11n upgrade is almost certainly in the cards for any company that's going to deploy these Cius devices in any significant numbers--at least if they're planning to use them for video.
Marty paints the picture:
Imagine half a dozen Cius users walking through an office building having an on-line HD video conference; sort of moving 'bandwidth magnets'. Enterprises will have to decide how much of this they can afford
That's the perfect phrase--"bandwidth magnets". And unless you have really good traffic information to tell you where these bandwidth magnets tend to go, and where they don't--you have to make sure you have thorough WLAN coverage. Maybe certain areas (restrooms, secure areas) are places where you deliberately don't have coverage, but everywhere else you need it.
Dell'Oro Group puts Cisco at the top of the market share list for WLAN infrastructure, so it looks like the Cius is, among other things, another example of the Cisco strategy of entering markets that help it drive demand for its basic infrastructure products. Cius is even a twofer in this regard: If it takes off, it'll drive bandwidth usage both on the wireless LAN and at the enterprise core, increasing demand for access points, controllers, and wired switch/routers.
