Today, these devices usually sneak in the back door; tomorrow, they'll strut in via the front. That's the way it's worked in the past. In the early days of PCs, many in IT believed that real men and women didn't use PCs -- they worked with big-iron mainframes. PCs were considered by many at the time as little more than toys. But PCs and software like spreadsheets were brought in to the enterprise by a variety of under-the-radar methods, such as being paid for out of expense accounts.

And those "toys" were so useful that they became grudgingly accepted. Think of them at the time as the tail of the dog. Then they proved their usefulness time and time again; suddenly the tail wagged the dog. Eventually the tail became nearly the entire dog.

Expect a similar transformation with tablets and . These devices may be small, but they're fully powered computers, and in many ways are more complicated than PCs because of the variety of radios and sensors built into them.

Already, they're forcing enterprises to do more than merely support them -- they're forcing a change in enterprises' basic computing infrastructure. The wireless LAN market has begun to boom, largely because of tablets. According to Computerworld, , a 28% increase over the same period in 2009. Dell'Oro Group says that wireless network revenue for 2010 was up 25% over the previous year.

Why the sudden jump? Roger Hockaday, a marketing director at Aruba Networks, says it's the iPad effect. Enterprises are adding to and upgrading their wireless networks so that people can use iPads anywhere in a corporation. As a result, he says, the wireless network market has undergone more change in the last six months than it did over the last six years.