"Definitely #1 is the tablet area. It's amazing that every VAR conference I go to has many people carrying these around," he says.
And perhaps a key issue is whether accounting firms will embrace Apple, whose iPad and iPhone have been huge hits, especially since there are virtually no applications available to run firms in this business.
"The young staff wants Droids and iPhones. You've got the business world that has embraced Blackberrys," notes Jim Bourke, principal with Red Bank, N.J.-based WithumSmith+Brown. "The problem we have with Apple and iPhones is that our whole world is not built around the Mac."
However, Schultz, who says business people are dropping the Blackberry in numbers, believes that the name on the device matters less and less. "As we see more products move to the cloud/SaaS I think the concept of what computer being used will start to be less important," says Schulz.
And tax and accounting vendors seem to be acknowledging that--at least introductions so far show that they are willing to support all of the major mobile platforms. And Apple products have been part of the roll out.
CCH Mobile, introduced in November, provides access to functions from the company's IntelliConnect research platform. That product came out of the gate with support for the Blackberry and the iPhone. CS Mobile from Thomson Reuters provides users with access to Practice CS databases via the iPhone and iPad and Intuit is also supporting those two devices for its ProLine tax research.
But it's still very early in the mobile game and no one is quite sure how all of these devices will fit in day-to-day operations. The announcements by the tax vendors have been for products that largely have been trials.
David Cieslak a principal with Arxis Technology, based in Simi Valley, says that firms will be looking at tablets to see how they can be incorporated into practices. "Can these be used in the field and can they be used from an audit perspective?" are questions he says firms are asking.
Many issues revolve around how different generations view technology and the adoption of the hot new devices and applications is still largely the realm of the young. Take the use of portals, which has been a hot-button for vendors.
As the end of last year, Thomson Reuters added features to staff and client portals that it said would make it easier to manage permission, add clients and work from tablets and other mobile devices. And it enabled firms to set up portals for multiple clients en masse.
But Cieslak says tax partners in the sister firm, Arxis Financial complain, "Our tax clients don’t want to use the portal; it’s too complicated." And those reactions also divide along age clients, "Especially some of our older clients are absolutely balking at using portals," he continues.
