If 2013 was the year of the tablet and cloud, will 2014 be the year they rescue your IT budget?

Never has more bang for the buck been available.  Inexpensive mobile devices running cloud applications are about to change everything for small businesses, non-profits and unions. 

Low-cost tablets have been widely hailed as a game-changer for personal entertainment, with their marketing and media coverage focused squarely in that milieu for obvious reasons.  Less is heard about what tablets can do for small businesses, non-profits and unions.  That’s mainly because the "apps for that" are particular at least to the type of enterprise, and often to the specific organization.  You won’t hear much about business apps on television or major media sites (except for those with very broad reach like Salesforce and QuickBooks), but the personal entertainment market for tablets is quickly educating administrators and managers about the capabilities of their wonderful new toys, with work applications coming to mind more lately with the increasing availability of attachable keyboards.  Add the maturation of cloud-based apps in the past few years, and light bulbs begin to come on.  In fact, 2014 will likely see administrators' and managers' heads glowing everywhere. 

If running your business apps on tablets and clouds sounds a little scary, you're probably not alone.  But once you take a breath and consider, it's actually not scary at all.  First, unlike past crossroads in tech (Windows vs Mac, Iphone vs Blackberry, VHS vs Beta, etc), this time it probably doesn't much matter which brand you buy.  Android, Windows and iOS tablets are all viable for web-based apps.   Second, the new generation of software applications (like our Step One Systems) are web-based and designed to work across a full range of web browsing devices.  These applications are generally more reliable, more secure, and more efficient to develop, maintain and customize than traditional enterprise software.  They'll run on any tablet you  fancy, and they'll run just as well on your old Windows XP laptop or MacBook.  

Of course there are still jobs that can only be done - or are better done - on a PC or Mac, but not everybody needs them.  If even a few laptops can be replaced with tablets, your organization saves a lot of money on both hardware and software.