Without the cloud service, IPad Pro is just a paper press on the executive desk.

Regardless of the "Pro" nickname is misleading, for many reasons, this device is not an enterprise-class device, nor is it very suitable for existing multiple vertical market applications. But I do not intend to dwell on these issues here.

The success or failure of this device depends on whether the senior business executives of large companies want to use it as their primary device, and they are now more likely to be using a Mac or a Windows laptop or even an ordinary ipad.

We need a better understanding of why we originally developed such a device, and who it actually developed for. In fact, the size of the device and the resolution of the screen reveal the secret of the consumption of video, documentation, and visual data.

What do senior executives do? They spend a lot of time on airplanes, so they watch movies, read magazines, watch news sites and newspapers, compose emails, review and annotate production documents and business reports, and they may also need access to certain types of data, such as CRM or Business Analytics.

All of this needs to be adapted to a large, high-resolution screen.

Some people might say that senior management is a very high level of staff. However, their work is not as complex as information workers, software developers, or even data scientists.

It is rumored that the ipad Pro has 4G of RAM, which is twice times higher than the previous high-end ipad (ipad Air 2). But this is still a pretty stressful memory configuration for Office applications, especially when there are other applications running in the background.

So what are the usual business requirements for running a generic application? In the vertical market, if there are legacy components, you need to run Windows frontend when the system architecture is not easy to decompose, so you need some type of remote access scenario, such as using Citrix, Windows RDS, or azure RemoteApp to display these apps.

In addition, applications must rely on network services for use. You can write an iOS front-end user experience, but the backend of this app will certainly not be stored on the same ipad with all the business logic and data.

So where are all these things running? It runs somewhere in the data center. If you look at the launch of the September 9 ipad Pro, you must have seen Microsoft come on stage to showcase its powerful file sharing and Office 365 collaboration capabilities.

All data is stored in the cloud, especially Microsoft's data centers located around the world.

You must also see a complex data visualization application, 3d-4 Medical, which will use an interactive anatomical model. While graphics processors and display units on the ipad are absolutely easy to render graphics, these data models still need to work with such applications, especially in medical imaging, aerospace and hundreds of terabytes of data.

In this type of application deployment, you have a client application that has remote processing power and data storage in the cloud.

This type of application is sometimes referred to as "Extreme SaaS" ("Extreme SaaS"). Until then, these things have been more theoretical than actual deployments, because the server-side use of GPU rendering in a public cloud environment is not fully cost-effective in delivering SaaS applications to ISVs or service providers.

We're very close, very close. More common deployment types, such as 3d-4 Medical, may be available in the next two years, but not yet.

Where are we going to be taken by all the above-mentioned? if ipad Pro becomes the trend for future business executives and certain types of high-data-driven vertical applications, then the real burden will be on the cloud.

This could be a public cloud, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute, and IBM Bluemix. They may even be industry-specific private clouds that need to address regulatory controls, such as the financial and healthcare industries.

What is the sum of all this? This means that the ipad Pro is the most expensive "thin" (thin) customer device ever.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. But if ipad Pro is the future of computing, especially for job-performing workers and high-end data visualization, then we really need to think about capacity management in the cloud and consider how we should rebuild LOB applications that were originally designed for the client server (client-server). These applications are now mentioned and transferred to IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) to minimize development and are scaled to PAAs in large-scale multitenant and public cloud environments (Platform as a service)

Because without cloud services, IPad Pro is just an expensive paper press.

Without the cloud service, IPad Pro is just a paper press on the executive desk.