Will iPad Lose Its Enterprise Throne to These Tablet Upstarts?

As Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook is fond of noting, the iPad has been widely adopted for enterprise use since its debut. In a Q2 2012 earnings call, Cook noted that 94 percent of Fortune 500 companies were either testing or deploying iPads for business usage. However, despite these rosy figures, at least one analyst believes that the iPad is ripe for a disruption in the enterprise tablet market. Patrick Moorhead, the president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy believes that several disruptive enterprise tablet technologies will soon present Apple with a challenge to its dominance of the enterprise tablet market.

Moorhead identifies Windows 8 as one of the disruptive tablet technologies because of its ability to operate on both tablets and desktops while maintaining compatibility with Windows 7 peripherals. Moorhead believes this compatibility is important for businesses that rely on Windows-centric productivity software like Microsoft Office.

Intel’s Atom Processor Z2760 is another disruptive tablet technology, according to Moorhead, because it enables other tablets to have, “at least the same system performance per watt,” that iPads have. This new processor is found in the Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) Latitude 10, the Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) ElitePad 900, and the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2, all of which run Windows 8 Metro-style and Windows 7 apps. As reported by All Things D, these tablets also feature “user-replaceable batteries” which give them “a longer useful battery life versus the iPad’s 10 hours.”