There’s no question that Apple was the primary force behind the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement. It didn’t take long for every executive to find themselves with an iPad in their hands, wondering why they had to use their god damn Blackberry when the email experience on their new tablet was so much better. Unfortunately, as is the case with most Apple products, the enterprise integration was severely lacking and the experience suffered as a result. Today the experience is much better although that’s mostly the result of third party vendors developing solutions, not so much Apple developing the capability themselves. It seems that after decades of neglecting the enterprise Apple is finally ready to make a proper attempt at it, although in the most ass backwards way possible.
Today Apple announced that it would be partnering with IBM in order to grow their mobility offerings starting with a focus on applications, cloud services and device supply and support. IBM is going to start off by developing 100 “industry specific” enterprise solutions, essentially native applications for the iPhone and iPad that are tailored for specific business needs. They’ll also be growing their cloud offering with services that are optimized for iOS with a focus on all the buzzwords that surround the BYOD movement (security, management, analytics and integration). You’ll also be able to source iOS devices from IBM with warranty backing by Cupertino, enabling IBM to really be your one stop shop for all things Apple related in the enterprise.
At a high level this would sound like an amazing thing for anyone who’s looking to integrate Apple products into their environment. You could engage IBM’s large professional services team to do much of the leg work for you, freeing you from worrying about the numerous issues that come from enabling a BYOD environment. The tailored applications would also seem to solve a big pain point for a lot of users as the only option most enterprises have available to them today is to build their own, a significantly costly endeavour. Plus if you’re already buying IBM equipment their supply chain will already be well known to you and your financiers, lowering the barrier to entry significantly.
Really it does sound amazing, except for the fact that this partnership is about 5 years late.
Ever since everyone wanted their work email on an iPhone there’s been vendors working on solutions to integrate non-standard hardware into the enterprise environment. The initial solutions were, frankly, more trouble than they were worth but today there are a myriad of applications available for pretty much every use case you can think of. Indeed pretty much every single thing that this partnership hopes to achieve is already possible today, not at some undetermined time in the future.
This is not to mention that IBM is also the last name you’d think of when it comes to cloud services, especially when you consider how much business they’ve lost as of late. The acquisition of SoftLayer won’t help them much in this regard as they’re building up an entirely new capability from scratch which, by definition, means that they’re offering will be behind everything else that’s currently available. They might have the supply chains and capital to be able to ramp up to public cloud levels of scalability but they’re doing it several years after everyone else has, in a problem space that is pretty much completely solved.
The only place I can see this partnership paying dividends is in places which have yet to adopt any kind of BYOD or mobility solution which, honestly, is few and far between these days. This isn’t an emerging market that IBM is getting in on the ground floor on, it’s a half decade old issue that’s had solutions from numerous vendors for some time now. Any large organisation, which has been IBM’s bread and butter since time immemorial, will already have solutions in place for this. Transitioning them away from that is going to be costly and I doubt IBM will be able to provide the requisite savings to make it attractive. Smaller organisations likely don’t need the level of management that IBM is looking to provide and probably don’t have a working relationship with Big Blue anyway.
Honestly I can’t see this working out at all for IBM and it does nothing to improve Apple’s presence in the enterprise space. The problem space is already well defined with solid solutions available from multiple vendors, many of which have already have numerous years of use in the field. The old adage of never getting fired for buying IBM has long been irrelevant and this latest foray into a field where their experience is questionable will do nothing to bring it back. If they do manage to make anything of this I will be really surprised as entering a market this late in the piece rarely works out well, even if you have mountains of capital to throw at it.
