“This iPad thing has taken the world by storm,” said Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and co-author of “Empowered,” which explores how employees use new technology. “It came in as a consumer product, and very quickly the people who actually bought them were businesspeople.”

Last month, Apple said it sold 3 million iPads within 80 days of its release. The company may sell 9.7 million iPads in 2010, says Shaw Wu, an analyst at Kaufman Bros. in San Francisco.

More than half – 52 percent – of 770 smart phone users surveyed by Zogby International said they would most likely use a tablet device like the iPad to do work. The study, commissioned by Dublin software company Sybase, was released March 23.

“A lot of businesses right now are in experimentation with these devices,” said Dan Shey, practice director for enterprise at ABI Research in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

Many companies may keep their distance from tablet computers, which boast smaller screens and don’t allow switching back and forth between tasks as quickly as bigger machines. Apple rivals, including Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems, are getting into tablets, too – so the iPad-maker’s lead may narrow.

For now, workplace adoption of the iPad stands to benefit Apple while undermining rival makers of computers that run Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Many companies initially chafed at letting employees use iPhones for business amid concerns that it might not keep corporate data secure. That resistance ebbed after Apple released a version of iPhone software in 2008 with beefed-up security and better support for corporate e-mail.

With their smaller screens, inability to multitask and lack of keyboards, tablets may not soon replace bigger computers for many work-related tasks. The iPad’s display is 9.7 inches. By 2015, less than one-fourth of personal computers sold will be tablets, Forrester says.

As popular as the iPad may be for businesses now, it may soon face competition from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics, which plan their own tablet computers. Cisco said last week that it will release a tablet that will be able to handle high-definition videoconferencing and may be available in early 2011.

Some companies may also be reluctant to entrust their data to the iPad after a breach on the AT&T website revealed the e-mail addresses of as many as 114,000 iPad users. Apple takes pains to keep its products secure in part by carefully vetting the applications that can be downloaded onto it.

Still, the process is “not foolproof, it will be subverted eventually,” said Mikko Hyppnen, chief research officer of Helsinki security firm F-Secure.

Reservations aside, Wells Fargo saw early on how quickly the iPad might take hold among business clients the weekend the device was released.

Finance executives of large companies – those that generate more than $50 million in revenue – accessed corporate Wells Fargo accounts with iPads, says Amy Johnson, a Wells Fargo vice president who works on the company’s online portal and mobile strategy. A finance official or account representative could use a mobile device like the iPad to approve multimillion-dollar wire transfers, she explains.

Johnson demonstrated one of the iPads bought by Wells Fargo during a May conference. She says she now carries the iPad with her everywhere.

Her fellow Wells Fargo executive, Minich, meanwhile, is waiting for an iPad after her boss made off with the one she expected to be assigned to her.