What is Happening? While most of the IT and consumer electronics world has been considering whether or not the “new iPad” rolled out by Apple this week is evolutionary or revolutionary (or, to borrow Apple’s bad pun, “resolutionary”), Saugatuck has been looking more deeply into the event and the announcement.

What we see is an important, and so-far overlooked, new management application targeted at institutional and enterprise customers, the Apple Configurator. This app provides a critical link in the Apple ecosystem for enterprise IT organizations, Mobile Device Management (MDM) providers, ISVs and VARs that allows enterprises to significantly improve and simplify the cost and complexity of managing iOS devices. Basically, the Configurator allows the configuration of an enterprise-standard iOS device/app image, then allows/enables that image to be deployed across multiple iOS devices. Previously, users and enterprises have had to manage multiple iTunes accounts in order to manage multiple iOS applications and content, depending through which account the apps and content were acquired. Such a management approach becomes onerous as the number of devices grows beyond even a few.

A very interesting ZDNet blog post/article has been circulating among Saugatuck research groups. It reflects some key tenets that we’ve been discussing with clients since the first iPad came out, to wit: If Apple wanted to, it could more or less decimate, if not destroy, competition in the large-format tablet market  simply by delivering a low-cost iPad. Keeping the iPad2 in play while selling the iPad3 would be a nifty way to do that.

In the Triassic period of the first iPads, we heard much the same sort of speculation. It didn’t (and really couldn’t) happen then, because Apple has never been the type of vendor to deliver a low-cost/cheap hardware alternative to anything, let alone its first major release of said hardware.

Yesterday’s iPad2 announcement punctuated a flurry of tablet device announcements in recent weeks. In particular, the iPad2 update revitalizes the popular tablet with new features designed to prepare it for its first real competition in this expanding market.  As we mentioned in our recent perspective (MKT-851 McNeill), the iPad has seen growing adoption among enterprise users (WSJ) who value the small tablet device for its battery life and simplicity along with a growing host of apps that make it well suited for business.  And though at first glance, the iPad2 update features may initially seem to be focused at mobile gamers, the HDMI support, added video cameras, and faster processor will translate equally well into new collaboration and presentation capabilities and will further drive adoption in the enterprise.

With this release, however, the iPad faces some real rivals from Motorola, Samsung, HP and Dell, all based on Android with the exception of the HP tablet which runs WebOS through its acquisition of Palm.  Notably absent at this point are traditional Windows-based devices. Given the tablet is projected to displace Netbook and laptop buying to a significant degree, and Microsoft does not appear to be actively participating in this transition, we may be witnessing a disruption in the enterprise franchise that Redmond has held in a hammer-lock for the past decade or more.    This shift to mobility devices has been driven at first by the “Consumerization of IT,” a trend we at Saugatuck have discussed since 2006 and then by the rapid adoption of SaaS and other Cloud-Based services that have allowed more computing to move from a user’s PC to the “virtual datacenter,” spanning systems on-premise and in the Cloud.