Yesterday’s announcement from Apple and IBM could secure Apple as the lead platform for the large enterprise, including banking and insurance. The joint announcement said: “The companies will collaborate to build IBM MobileFirst for iOS Solutions—a new class of ‘made-for-business apps’ targeting specific industry issues or opportunities in retail, healthcare, banking, travel and transportation, telecommunications and insurance, among others, that will become available.”
Angela Eager at the UK’s TechMarketView, said this will give Apple direct access to big business and offer more smarts for smartphones, since IBM can do the big data analytics and deliver results tailored for display and manipulation on mobile devices, including iPhones and iPads.
It is a blow to Microsoft which touts the Surface convertible tablet as the perfect tool for business. Despite having held a monopoly on native deployments of Microsoft Office for years, until it released Office for iPad in March, Surface and Windows 8 have struggled. The Apple devices had been widely used in business, often over initial objections of IT. Now they are pretty common and especially popular in financial sales where financial advisors and mortgage reps, for example, can sit with clients and share the display of products and calculators to help them make choices. Presumably it would also allow complex applications, such as risk, to be run on IBM analytics engines like Algorithmics in the cloud with delivery to iPads for further exploration of the numbers.
Surface has been deployed in some retail banking locations, including RBC in Canada, while others, such as Metro Bank in London, have lobby staff equipped with Windows 8 on Samsung tablets.
The joint agreement says IBM will provide “a new class of more than 100 industry-specific enterprise solutions including native apps, developed exclusively from the ground up, for iPhone and iPad.”
The alliance also provides Apple with cloud strategy, enabling it to compete against Microsoft’s Azure for business users — “unique IBM cloud services optimized for iOS, including device management, security, analytics and mobile integration.” That should remove some of the common IT concerns over security and the need to shut down a device that is lost or stolen.
No word on whether IBM would supply specific business applications, such as banking, through partners or whether it will develop the apps itself..
Although Apple and IBM have often been rivals, they were, for a time, partners. IBM supplied the PowerPC chips for the Apple MacIntosh from the early 90s to about 2006 when Apple moved to Intel X86 chips for its computers.
