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The adoption of tablets by small businesses is poised to grow tremendously in 2013, and it’s a match made in heaven. By now, many of you have been to a hip restaurant where the waiters have ditched their note pads, and are now taking orders for their delicious meals with an iPad. Sending the orders straight through to the kitchen before they’ve even left the side of your table. Or, you may have been to a small, high-end clothing boutique. Where the salesperson checks the availability of a particular style – that you absolutely can’t live without – against their inventory, without ever going to the back of the store to check.

Small business and the iPad were made for each other, and this graphic from Intuit has all the stats to show you the growth of tablets over the years to come.

The adoption of tablets in business from 2011-2012 grew 140% for companies with less than 99 employees. This growth isn’t looking to slow down anytime soon, with the projected growth for tablets by size of company from 2011-2016 looking like this:

Enterprise: 1,000+ Employees – 62.7%

Midsize: 100-999 Employees – 50.8%

Small: 10-99 Employees – 78.5%

Micro: <10 Employees – 98%

As the use of tablets becomes more ubiquitous for personal use, their use in a business setting is looking to grow tremendously over the next 5 years. For midsize businesses, their adoption is expected to be a bit slower, as its more costly to empower each employee with an expensive tech gadget – especially when not every employee necessarily needs one. For micro business, the use of a tablet makes perfect sense. A few devices will satisfy the needs of every employee there, and allow them to perform their jobs at a technologically advanced level.

This next bit probably won’t come as a surprise….The iPad is the small business tablet of choice. It’s rather insane to see how much of a market share the iPad has. At 92.6%, the iPad eclipses its nearest competitor. The real race, you might say, is being fought over the scraps between the Blackberry Playbook, Android, and Microsoft Surface.

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via: Intuit