Wells Fargo and Others Embrace the iPad
By 
Apple continues to make inroads into the corporate world with the iPad. The most recent announcement comes from the banking industry. Wells Fargo has made it clear they’re getting iPads for many of their employees.
According to Megan Minich, a senior vice president for Wells Fargo in San Francisco, her colleagues used a few iPads to demonstrate financial products at a recent investors’ conference. And, Wells Fargo has more on the way.
This is very interesting given that Wells Fargo spent a couple of years analyzing the iPhone before making a decision to let their employees use the device at work. The iPad only took weeks to get the official clearance by the company.
This is an interesting trend in the corporate world. Recently, Daimler AG’s Mercedes Benz officially announced they are using the iPad for tasks such as work e-mail, approving shipping orders and for auto-finance options.
Other companies are allowing the iPad to make inroads into the corporate world. For example, SAP AG, a well known company in the business-management software segment, has employees that are using the iPad to access business applications, briefing documents, customer information and other data. The same goes for Audi and other automobile industries, the airline industry, the healthcare industry and many others.
Apple has sold over 3 million iPads already. The majority of those sales have gone to regular consumers. Big sales estimates continue to float around the industry, as many predict Apple will sell close to 10 million iPads before years end.
It’s hard to predict how the market will continue to evolve. The iPad probably will not replace your work computer completely, at least not in every market segment. However, it is a tremendous complementary tool for many work-related tasks, and we’re already seeing it. One thing is for sure, the corporate world seems to be opening a bit more to the iPad.
