Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s interest for the enterprise has fluctuated in its history. Currently, while its marketing campaigns are customer centric, organizations across the globe of varying sizes have embraced its products.
Apple lost the personal computer competition in 1980s primarily because enterprises opted for other companies’ products. To sum up, Apple neither liked selling to enterprises nor was good at the same. The firm greatly preferred direct selling to customers.
The release of iPad catapulted Apple to the top of the enterprise market. The iPad quickly became the gadget of choice among businesses and professionals. Apple quickly understood the huge demand for iPads. Hence, it made a strategic move by offering bulk purchases to businesses and crafting superior tools to deploy enterprise applications.
As per reports, Apple is gearing up for additional iPad deployments including releasing new iPad versions having larger screens. Curiously, iPad adoption resulted in many additional iPhones in businesses. Unprecedented enterprise demand for iPad and the framework created by companies for the device’s compatibility with enterprise infrastructure and policies supported the iPhone devices also.
The year 2010 was also the time when BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) was floundering which gave Apple an advantage. Swapping Blackberry devices for iPhone let businesses do away with back-end BlackBerry Enterprise Servers and reduce expenditure.
It was the support for Microsoft Exchange email – a game changer that let people access their work mail on iPhone and make it possible and advantageous to replace their existing devices with iPhone. By 2010 when the iPhone 4 was released, businesses accounted for 40% of iPhone sales. According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, by 2014 nearly all Fortune 500 companies used the iPhone and iPad. According to Tim Cook 98% of Fortune 500 used iPad and 97% used iPhone.
In 2014, Apple and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) announced a strategic collaboration for creating more than 100 enterprise apps that would feature on both the iPad and iPhone. The apps would be designed for different industry verticals.
Better security, easier manageability and the presence of iOS make Apple solutions attractive to businesses. The factors which hold Apple products back according to enterprises are prohibitive costs, the absence of integration with third-party business software and scarcity of management tools.
Sources: zdnet
