2012 will be an interesting year to track and watch how the business world is embracing the tablet revolution.  It seems like yesterday when President Clinton initiated the paperless office initiative.  Back in the 90’s it seemed like it could be possible, until the cost of digitizing, scanning and storing all of those documents electronically became clear.

Now, it seems that technology has caught up to make that vision a reality.  The advent of the iPad and Android tablet market has empowered a myriad of robust solutions to help reduce the increasing cost and environmental damage of using paper.  Tablets have also increased the efficiency of the work flow process as well.

We have seen a dramatic increase in the interest of mid-sized and large companies to use tablets in order to create efficiencies in many areas such as field services, route accounting, sales, customer accounting, general communication and digital document management.  This is mainly due to the after -market of refurbished iPad’s and lower cost Android tablets that make the deployment of these devices a cost effective reality.

The ability to add a signature, make changes, save and store digital documents has also helped a great deal in garnering interest in utilizing tablets.  Security, which is always a concern, can be maintained with a host of device management software suites to track the usage of deployed tablets over a wide array of employees and geographic areas.

What’s helping with the lower cost of entry in the tablet market?  Last year the tablet manufacturers fell short of being able to produce enough tablets to meet market demand with about 52 million units created.  This year the manufacturers will be more prepared to meet that market demand with an estimated production capacity of roughly 80+ million units.

Obviously this market will take more time to mature, but clearly it will not be a fad that disappears.  Tablets will be with us in one form or another for quite some time and hopefully reduce the amount of that pesky paper that still clutters most workers desks.