Are Netbooks Poised For A Business Breakthrough?

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Even in challenging economic times, netbooks are tearing up the consumer market. Customers are looking to these lightweight, mobile PCs as a low-cost alternative to full-size notebooks. Vendors and solution providers have been struggling to sell netbooks into the business space, but that may be changing.

Solution providers would be remiss if they didn't try to figure out how to sell netbooks to their business customers. According to a July study, The NPD Group predicts an overall 99.1 percent growth in netbooks, from 16.4 million to 32.7 million units, year over year, from 2008 to 2009.

Notebook sales, on the other hand, are predicted to fall 0.1 percent in 2009, from 129.6 million units in 2008 to 129.5 million this year.

Jim Lippie, president of Staples Network Services, thinks the trick to selling netbooks to business users might be identifying the correct segment of the market.

"The reason for netbooks' popularity is pretty obvious," said Lippie. "They are fun, small and light devices. But netbooks can also be a great tool for a specific subset for end users in the business community, particularly those who travel frequently and use Web-based applications."

Lippie believes end users in sales roles are likely to get the most benefit from netbooks. Specifically benefiting will be salespeople who need a secondary device to complement an existing desktop or notebook for business travel and running lightweight, cloud-based applications.

"The people who are prime candidates for netbooks at work are people who are e-mail-intensive and use applications like Salesforce.com a lot -- that's good for a netbook. Similarly, people who use a Web-based app to store sales presentations might be good candidates as well."

It is important, however, that customers are informed netbooks don't have the internal capabilities to do content production or some of the heavy-duty lifting that many business users require, said Gregg Prendergast, vice president of commercial sales and marketing at Acer.

"A netbook is fine at home," said Prendergast. "But if a user wants to run a little bit more heavy-duty application, the Intel Atom processor may run out of power."

Intel's Atom processor is currently the dominant chip in netbooks on the market.

Because the Atom processor is designed for long battery life and to run applications that don't require many resources, content creation -- the sort done in Microsoft Office -- isn't a particular strength of netbooks, said Richard Hutton, senior channel marketing manager at Samsung ITD.

"The main question with netbooks is whether or not they can do the job they need to do," he said. "Cranking up the full Office suite might be a bit of a problem -- netbooks aren't a panacea -- but with the growth of Software-as-a-Service and a highly mobile sales force, a netbook might be a perfect solution for a customer."

But not all customers. In fact, a June study conducted by NPD Group found that nearly 60 percent of consumers who bought a netbook were expecting to get full notebook capabilities.

Next: The Solution Provider Advantage

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