Apple and IBM Partner for Enterprise Mobility

Our Figure shows Apple and IBM’s large, but non-adjacent shares of the IT market split by size of company and consumers. It’s a clear reason why the 2 would want to do business together today – very different from 30 years ago when Apple likened IBM to Big Brother in its Superbowl advert announcing the introduction of the Macintosh…. or when it moved from PowerPC to Intel Xeon chips to power the Mac.

Even when Apple’s iPhone and iPad were breaking all records in terms of revenue and unit shipment growth the proportion coming from business accounts was small; but it didn’t have to be very big to make it the fastest growing offering. While now ‘over 98% of the Fortune 500 and over 92% of the Global 500 using iOS devices’ according to IBM and Apple’s press release, its still typical for these to be consumer devices used in a business context.

Certainly Apple has done little in the past to make its products fit for business use, jettisoning its own servers, handling operating system upgrades itself and only recently allowing corporate discounts on apps. But times are getting tougher in the Smart device market – we think the market actually contracted by 2% in Q1. So its natural for Apple to plan to make more money from the corporate market.

Over the years IBM – by contrast – has distanced itself almost entirely from consumer markets – it offloaded its PC division to Lenovo back in 2006 and has lost most of its gaming console processor business to AMD last year. Its recent poor financial results make it vital to turn its excellent vision of modern computing into money making activities.

The partnership with Apple will see IBM under its MobileFirst strategy:

• Provide a choice of 100 vertical market apps for iOS and, in the process, helping to bring consumption and management under centralised control; it plans to use its experience of delivering 400 Smarter Planet solutions and to target Banking, Insurance, Telco, Retail, Government, Travel/ Transportation and Healthcare sectors initially
• Deliver a platform for iOS, using its newly launched BlueMix for application development (integration, analytics, workflow and Cloud storage) and its MaaS360 for security, device management and application catalogue elements
• Help create AppleCare for Enterprise, giving users the choice of Apple’s 24×7 English language support and  customisable service solutions branded as IBM
• Sell iPads, iPhones and Macs as a reseller with its Global Financing capabilities and providing procurement, security, activation and management via MaaS360

While today IBM is Apple’s only Enterprise partner, I think it will need to form others. It will definitely need something similar for selling and supporting System x customers when the business moves to Lenovo. Could Lenovo also take advantage of MobileFirst for the Motorola Smart Phone business its taken from Google? We could imagine similar systems for Red Hat Open Stack and even Android in time.

As for the partnership itself I see it as a natural development of Matrix Integration and should give Microsoft and Google camps something new to worry about.