THEY?RE highly successful as consumer devices, but is Apple?s iPad cutting the mustard in the business world?
Yesterday two restaurants in inner Sydney were spruiking the benefits of using Apple's iPad to manage everything from the taking of table orders through to billing and inventory.
Sailor's Thai, a trendy Thai restaurant at The Rocks nearby Sydney's CBD, uses half a dozen iPad Minis to manage food orders. Waiters come to tables not with traditional dog-eared café order pads, but with iPad Minis which register food orders and, over WiFi, cause them to be printed in the nearby kitchen.
Using an iPad point-of-sale solution called Revel, the iPads list all menu items and keep track of each course's preparation and delivery, handle billing and payments, and monitor food usage and inventory down to ingredient level.
Restaurant owner Jason Tait, a former software business owner, hit on the iPad solution after he bought Sailor's Thai in 2011. He said the iPad Mini software maintained the restaurant's data in the cloud and cached orders during any network disruption. No server was required.
The restaurant used a web based system Deputy.Com to manage staffing and rostering.
Across the city another stylist restaurant and corporate catering business, Food Society at Darlinghurst, has been using the Ontario, Canada-developed Aireus point-of-sale system to manage its table ordering, food inventory and cash journal with iPad Minis.
Co-owner Sonia Stanojevic said its point-of-sale system cost $2000-2500 to setup and $210 per month to operate, but was cheaper than traditional POS backroom systems with a $10,000-$15,000 price tag.
Food Society, which also does external catering, takes its iPad to events and lets customers monitor a bar tab, and close it when it reaches its maximum.
Apple has been proactive in taking its iPad solution to small business and retailers, and has sought a major slice of the health and education markets for it.
In Australia there have been massive iPad rollouts to students at the University of Western Sydney, to science students at the University of Adelaide, and in the retail sector,
Woolworths last year gave 1,000 store managers iPads for handling customer inquiries. It also is trialling the iPod Touch for monitoring and scanning stock in shopping aisles.
In the US last week, Apple snared a massive $US30 million contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District that will see it provide 35,000 iPads to students at 47 schools.
But in these big vertical markets, it faces stiff competition from Microsoft and device manufacturers such as Samsung, Lenovo and Acer, and hasn't always been getting its own way.
In Queensland, a recent $13 million contract to supply 14,000 secondary students with a tablet computer went to Acer.
In NSW, the Department of Education has been working in partnership with Chinese manufacturer Lenovo.
Apple also faces heavy discounting by the competition. This week Microsoft announced radical discounts for its Surface RT tablet for educational institutions.
A Surface RT with 32Gigabytes of storage will cost these institutions $219, less than half its estimated retail price of $559.
Microsoft is being bullish about wanting to get its tablets into big vertical markets. Similar discounts apply in 25 countries.
These markets are incredibly lucrative. For example, in February, Apple executives reportedly met with Turkey's president to discuss a $US4.5 billion rollout of 15 million tablets to Turkey's school children over 4 years. And that's just one market in one country.
