Apple Teams Up With IBM for Enterprise Push

People here are <i>waaaay</i> overstating the importance of this arrangement.<p>IBM is a services and consulting company, and as such it will sell you <i>anything</i> you want so long as you&#x27;re willing to pay a service and support contract for it.<p>People are not aware that IBM has about as much in-house knowledge of Solaris and HP-UX as AIX, or Oracle as much as DB&#x2F;2; customers routinely pay them to support other&#x27;s software and hardware, and it&#x27;s a business that works out nicely for them.<p>The only thing this means is that Apple will now be another official partner of IBM, with potentially some more help than usual, but believe me: if customers want IBM to support their app running Android or Windows Phone clients, you&#x27;re damn sure they&#x27;ll have that option and will have no issue doing the dance, though they may certainly entice you to use their partner&#x27;s competition software if they can.<p>But from their core business standpoint, this is no more important than their current experience in using JD Edwards, RIM, Oracle, Cognos, Informix, or any of the other products through which IBM makes billions a year, directly or indirectly. And they would certainly <i>never</i> consider Apple hardware on the desktop for the vast majority of their customers.<p>This is a company with over 300000 employees worldwide, several hundreds of software and hardware partners in every possible IT subdomains, and a direct reach to tens of millions of people. This affects their regular business very, very little, which is still a core niche of banks, insurance companies, governments, military contractors and health care.

This seems like a very smart move for both parties and is going to massively disruptive effect on the industry. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how Google and Microsoft react (especially since Microsoft seems to be finally dragging itself out of the Ballmer dark age).<p>It&#x27;s a perfect synergy<i>[1]</i>, with IBM having dropped hardware some time ago and subsequently, most software, in favour of open-source + prestige R&amp;D + consultancy services. Apple on the other hand, makes some of the best hardware around and turns a good profit doing it, and they also have some of the best software UX (if not necessarily the most powerful solutions). Put the two together and it&#x27;s an extremely potent combination, as long as they can pull off the collaboration effectively. Apple is already making fairly serious inroads into corporate IT since BYOD became a thing. To a lesser extent, they&#x27;ve been a business brand longer than they&#x27;ve been perceived as purely consumer-oriented, with the design industry being the only thing that kept them alive in the 90s pre-iPod-turnaround.<p>It will also be interesting to see what impact this has on open source, because that&#x27;s something that IBM currently supports heavily so they can avoid the cost of developing a lot of common business software in-house. This partnership might herald a preference for, for example, Apple servers running OSX, over Linux.<p>A more positive outcome is that we&#x27;re likely to see significant improvements in Apple software to meet needs that IBM clients will demand: stuff that tends to sit on a dusty shelf for years, like fixing SMB support in OSX, might start seeing some serious engineering investment by Apple.<p>We also might see an end to Apple&#x27;s &quot;no rollbacks&quot; policy, which IMO is a serious barrier to adoption in corporate environments (and is a huge pain for testing). No IT department worth its salt will ever push out a possibly breaking change like an OS update without a rollback plan, but Apple actively prevents that right now. Either that, or Apple will need to up it&#x27;s release cycles to match the way SaaS is typically managed and take bug reports more seriously, although probably only when they come through a priority channel reserved for corporate customers, much like how Microsoft handles &quot;unofficial&quot; hotfixes that don&#x27;t go into Windows update.<p><i>[1] Apologies for using the word &quot;synergy&quot; but it really is appropriate here.</i>

IBM makes some of the worst front end software in the world. Lotus Notes, Rational Rose, Doors etc. Deeply nested menus, one level of undo, zero to negative OS integration, bugs that never get fixed, unsearchable documentation, bloat upon bloat, everything that gives enterprise software a bad name.<p>I wonder whether Apple will bring IBM up or will IBM bring Apple down on that front.

I wanted to immediately shout, &quot;now THIS is something SJ would be rolling in his grave over.&quot; However, in the mid 2000s he was a big believer in switching to Intel and even though I found it hard to believe a company that pushed PowerPC for so long was suddenly so willing to join &quot;the dark side&quot; at the time.<p>His Intel switch bet played off for Apple and I imagine this bet by Tim Cook will also play out for them. I look forward to having many more years of iOS work and many more years of Xcode and iOS SDK improvements :-). Stability and security will be at the top of the lists :-D

The last big Apple-IBM alliance in 1991 gave the world Taligent, Kaleida, and the PowerPC:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AIM_alliance</a>

Funny. I just started @ IBM. Can&#x27;t run Windows because I have privileged access to systems. Can&#x27;t BYOD because same. Can&#x27;t hackintosh because licensing. And officially they don&#x27;t buy Macs.

Nobody ever got fired for buying Apple?

I see very little benefit for Apple.<p>IBM makes complex expensive software that people are still trying to get rid of in the enterprise. Apple doesn&#x27;t need a sales force for iPads, most top execs have been demanding iPads for the last 2 years already, it&#x27;s just IT that&#x27;s slow to adopt it because they fear loss of control with BYOD.<p>Only upside here is stuff like Watson and the likes. I can see IBM providing back-end services to Apple but that&#x27;s about it.

This is Apple making an attack at Google. Microsoft is a gonner in a few years. Google was ready to take charge of their market with Google apps and cloud services.<p>Apple is gonna make IBM build a cloud base infrastructure with Apple User interface and QA. We are talking very high end costumers, not the typical small or medium corp. No one will be fired for buying Apple and IBM. Google, maybe.<p>Enterprise Cloud was one Horse race for Microsoft market. Now there are two.

Better article&#x2F;interview: <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101834316" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;id&#x2F;101834316</a>

I think a lot of people are missing the point here. If you look at Apple&#x27;s big push into new markets (Healthkit) and the mobile market direction (possibly towards wearables) which have a huge upside when paired with a high quality health data collection market. So Apple is moving to a good position in the front end of the coming health care aware wearables market but that&#x27;s not nearly as valuable as having one of the hugest backend healthcare services providers as a close partner. IBM is a huge health care cloud provider, I&#x27;m pretty sure they are the largest in fact. So imagine an end to end health care data solution, Apple controlling the actual devices and health kit based software clients and IBM gathering and storage&#x2F;analysis services in the cloud. It&#x27;s a huge market in the US alone and a fantastic way for Apple to gain a large chunk of the wearables market, with a better integrated end to end solution.<p>I have no inside info but I can&#x27;t imagine that Apple isn&#x27;t thinking of this as a move going forward.

They&#x27;re talking about Google here but this is more of a claim against Microsoft&#x27;s territory. It looks like a play to replace Active Directory and Exchange Server with device-integrated cloud services.

A lot of people seem to dismiss this as a bad idea, but it makes sense to me. I see it as IBM becoming the <i>&quot;SourceBits for Enterprise Customers&quot;</i> [0]. They just add another zero or two on their hourly rate and package it up into a &quot;solution&quot;.<p>Also, the article mentions retail as an initial target industry. Their Websphere platform powers some big ecommerce sites [1]. Now they can go after those customers and sell them mobile retail solutions. Plus it&#x27;s probably a big F&amp;B for the sales team selling Websphere.<p>I&#x27;m sure the same goes for any commercial &quot;products&quot; IBM has for banking&#x2F;travel&#x2F;healthcare. Even if they just act as &quot;implementation providers&quot; for 3rd party products, to be able to say &quot;choose us because we will also build you an iPad app for your BIGHealthDataSystem install&quot; is pretty huge.<p>Also, this is great for iOS developers because there will be more jobs available.<p>Hopefully (and I&#x27;m reaching on this one), it also means IBM will create&#x2F;contribute to more open-source iOS&#x2F;Obj-C&#x2F;Swift projects and tools.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.sourcebits.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sourcebits.com&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.sparkred.com/blog/2013-leading-ecommerce-platforms-for-the-top-100-online-retailers-research/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sparkred.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2013-leading-ecommerce-platfor...</a>

Taligent anyone?<p>It will be interesting to see how this works out. The one thing Apple lacks is the monster enterprise salesforce that IBM has. And that may be the strongest thing that IBM has left.

I&#x27;m not sure this is a good idea for Apple which its root were always based on Consumer product. Steve Jobs hated Enterprise Market. Its fair to believe that Enterprise is an opposite site of Consumer. Their principle of requirement, design or even purchasing decision are very different. You can&#x27;t please everyone. I wonder how will next i-Devices look like if they are trying to please enterprise rather than the consumer.

Welcome, IBM.<p>Seriously.

Apple isn&#x27;t doing anything that unusual here. Hardware doesn&#x27;t have to be &quot;consumer&quot; or &quot;enterprise&quot; -- your PC at home and your PC at work aren&#x27;t that different. It&#x27;s software and sales that are very different between home and work -- IBM will layer &quot;enterprise&quot; software and sales models on top of Apple hardware and both players should make money.

I&#x27;d love to see Watson replace Siri someday.

I&#x27;m surprised so few people or articles mentioned the 1984 ad, and how Apple used to think IBM is the Anti-Christ.

This is ratification that iOS devices have an important presence in enterprises, which may be important to the three people in the industry who hadn&#x27;t yet realized that.<p>Otherwise, it&#x27;s business as usual -- IBM customers have a need that has something to do with IT, IBM puts together an offering to address it.

So they are now going to screw blackberry from other side as well. This is a bad news for Microsoft as well.

Does this mean the DB&#x2F;2 on the Mac will finally reach version parity with Linux? (I am not kidding)

Now Apple has to produce a new spot about IBM <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA</a>

Notice that this don&#x27;t mention anything about OS X.

It&#x27;s like Apple have bought IBM for the grand price of absolutely nothing. All the upside, none of the risk. (Someone in Cupertino was taking notes from the Wall St bailouts . . . )<p>For IBM this has to be their last shot before sliding off into oblivion, with their resurgence now looking incredibly temporary. All they really bring at this point is customer relationships and service monkeys, with the former being what Apple are really after.

Headline could use some clarification...at first I thought this was about enterprise push notifications.

My enemy&#x27;s enemy is my friend, until he also becomes my enemy, which happens sooner or later

IBM will devour their money, just hope that the resulting product is worth it.

Is an osx server better for command line admin than the non-server version?

Can&#x27;t wait for iOS&#x2F;2 Armonk with CoreDB2 for iThinkPad.

It seems Apple and IBM have done this before: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Taligent</a>

Is this only for the Enterprise? ( BTW IBM Notes Sucks )<p>PowerPC? And the Fab IBM is trying to sell but no one wants?

Antitrust.

I think IBM needs this more than Apple.

This makes me incredibly happy.

I see this as a sign of weakness for Apple. My gut feeling is this is a sign Apple if feeling vulnerable.

Makes sense given the historical past alliances [1]<p>Combined with extensions in iOS, I wonder if we can expect to see similar partnerships soon across the enterprise space?<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PowerPC</a>

The Times They Are a-Changin&#x27;

This smells of desperation for IBM - it seems to be risk free for Apple. IBM sells their expensive mainframes&#x2F;server, expensive consultants, and oh by the way, you have to buy 300 iPads as well as part of the contract.

Oh, how the Mighty have fallen. Big Blue used to be the cream of the crop.

Is branding driving the bus when what counts as innovation for Apple in 2014 is the iBMPhone? The only way this makes sense is if Apple is planning to purchase IBM because otherwise they are the weaker party in a partnership - phones and tablets and pc&#x27;s are commodities, big iron boxes and enterprise expertise are not.

IBM moved away from X86-X64 hardware, sold them to Lenovo.<p>IBM knows it is the Post-PC and Post-Microsoft era.<p>IBM sees Apple using ARM for mobile devices, and Apple, Motorola, and IBM once were partners in the PowerPC technology. So possible IBM and Apple could make a new series of ARM chips for servers and mobile devices. Apple wants to drop Samsung for ARM chips and other stuff, and IBM could replace Samsung.<p>IBM could make ARM based servers that run OSX Server in a blade configuration for Apple, and Apple can license iOS to IBM for mobile devices, and OSX Server for servers.<p>I figure a new version of OSX called OSX&#x2F;2 will be made, with puns towards OS&#x2F;2 that came out of Microsoft-IBM working together. One that is ARM and X64 based and uses some universal binary format to make apps run on both platforms.