Defining The Boundary Between Business Tech Buying And Consumer Tech Buying

The spreading bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon has created a more complex landscape of tech buying. But traditional divisions between consumer tech purchases and business tech purchases still matter to vendors (they need to know who to market to) and to CIOs (they need to know what technology to pay for and support). To bring order to the confusion, Forrester has developed a model for dividing tech purchases based on who chooses, who pays, who uses, and how technology is used. To show how the model works, we have estimated the distribution of Apple iPads in use in 2012 among the various scenarios and found that US business and governments directly purchased 18% of Apple iPads in the US. However, subtracting iPads bought by business but provided to consumer customers and adding iPad purchases made by employees as consumers but reimbursed by their corporate employers, we estimate that businesses and governments ended up paying for 21% of the iPads in use in the US.