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Tablet fever has hit businesses in the Asia-Pacific region, with nearly a quarter of IT leaders in the region planning on buying the devices for employees despite looming budget cuts over the next 12 months, according to IDC research.

The analyst’s annual Continuum end user survey questioned over 1,600 CIOs, IT directors and managers across the region (excluding Japan) and found that, thanks to continued tough economic conditions, the biggest priority for the next year would be dealing with fewer funds.

On the mobility side, the number set to purchase tablets in the next 12 months virtually doubled, from 12 per cent last year to 22 per cent.

Avneesh Saxena, VP of IDC's Asia Pacific research group, told The Reg that it’s not just downward pressure from senior execs driving interest from enterprise buyers.

“[Tablets] are efficiency-and-productivity-boosting agents as companies implement mobile solutions for a number of manual processes within the organisation, and some are also finding great use for tablets from purposes like reading reports and speeches, and communication in local languages by writing when they can’t type,” he argued.

Although enterprises in Asia Pacific are often less mature than their western counterparts when it comes to areas such as virtualisation and analytics, they could have an advantage in the mobile space, said Saxena.

“Mobility is interesting since we have two huge markets in India and China with better mobile penetration than PCs. This means that deploying mobile solutions could be easier in some ways,” he said.

“I also feel there are fewer legacy apps in some countries in APAC that could make it easier for them to consider moving towards mobile solutions. However, having said that, moving business critical apps onto mobile will likely happen more in the developed markets while consumer-focussed apps will have a bigger market in APAC.” ®

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