“Big Blue has 30,000 employees sporting iPhones, 10,000 toting iPads, and another 10,000 workers carrying MacBooks, according to a presentation last week at Macworld iWorld,” Eric Lai reports for ZDNet. “That’s 50,000 Mac and iOS devices total.”
“I maintain a list of the iPad enterprise deployments, along with a separate list of the 50 largest iPad rollouts,” Lai reports. “Based on what I’ve seen, IBM may be the largest Apple deployment out there, and the second-largest iOS mobile device deployment.”
Read more in the full article here.
Fantastic irony! So the world is going as Microsoft fades into the irrelevance sunset.
The irony goes even further:
IBM had the opportunity of keeping Apple on the PowerPC chip instead of forcing them to go Intel. Sadly, IBM never did come up with low power chips for contemporary iBooks and PowerBooks, cutting their own throats as Apple dumped them and went elsewhere.
Good. Intel was the best thing to ever happen to Apple’s marketshare.
In ye olden days it was the IBMification of corporate computing with IBM big iron mainframes. That was when the dinosaurs stil roamed the earth.
Then came Microsoft, the T-Rex of the dinosaur age that ate up market share like a devouring dervish leaving Apple with a rounding error of, let’s admit it, less than 2% overall market share, about as well as WP7 is doing today in mobile.
Today with the iPhone, iPad & Mac, the Applefication of IBM has begun and is rapidly gaining ground, pushing aside the dinosaurs of the day which archaeologists will find in 2020 as the NTFS file system buried deep in the archival records within the IBM K-T boundary layer.
heh, thank you Dr. Ballmer.
IBM’s official policy on employee workstations is now open to preference of the employee themselves. IBM is moving toward a less dependent, single platform of hardware and software. The only requirement for an IBM employee is adherence to corporate security and data privacy standards and regulations and business conduct guidelines… which aside from the US Federal Government are some of the most stringent. Aside from this it’s up to the employee. The proliferation of the Apple in IBM has nothing to do with the company itself actively adopting the devices and has more to do with the depth of relationship and experience between Apple and its customer. I know, I have been an Apple customer for 18 years and an IBMer using a Mac inside IBM for 12.
I am one of them. The day our exclusive contract with Lenovo ended several years ago I brought my 30” Cinema Display and my MacBook Pro into my office. Since that day, most of my direct reports have switched to the Mac. I can really say I enjoy my work, in part thanks to the opportunity I have to use my Apple gear (this includes my iPhone and my iPad too).
I forgot to mention that I am an Apple user and software developer since the early 80s.
Sounds hard to believe!!
The last time I visited an IBM office, a few years ago, employees where Lenovo-made Thinkpads and no other kind of PC equipment.
where = had
“The last time I visited an IBM office, a few years ago…”
A few years ago, you said. A hell of a lot can, and does, happen in a few years. You might have noticed this small, but salient, fact.
I know you are right.
Nevertheless my personal experience is that IT deparments “evolve” more slowly. For the last 4 years i have been a consultant for a company that has not changed a single piece of hardware.
Of course I try keep my personal gear up to date, my Macbook pro is only one year old, and It is running OSX 10.7 Lion and I have a brand new Iphone 4s
It seems like only yesterday:
http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR2xJaTGNVylQRFBfMknEG5rw0MkPklUIVKeFcP0KdYHs-43jD2
Does this surprise anyone? And how indicative of Apple’s success is Big Blue’s deployment of iPads, iPhones, and Macs? It is more an indication of other hardware makers failure and Microsoft’s delusion of Windows everywhere.
Godwin’s Law lives!
Consumerization of IT & Enterprise will be KING!!!
IBM still services a lot of big iron corporate clients. If they’re carrying the Apple flag with them, goodness must folow.
Think = Think Different How cool is that.
folow = follow
Anyone thinking Big Blue was MS friendly knows nothing of IBM.
From OS/2 to the entire Java thing, they’ve been at odds for decades.
OS/2 was when Microsoft kicked IBM in the balls. OS/2 limped around for a few years thereafter. It was shortly after IBM sold off its ThinkPad division to Lenovo that they killed off OS/2, a sort of 1, 2, CHOP castration of IBM’s PC nuts. No wonder they went Apple thereafter.
If IBM isn’t making Think Pads, who cares?
I’m heading to Ohio Monday. Our company sales force of around 150 are beginning training for the week on new iPads . We are going to be on salesforce.com. Once the salesforce is trained they are considering rolling iPads out to our technicians in the field. We have 3000+ technicians. We operate in 30+ countries around the world and have a world market share of almost 25%. Monday is the first time ANY apple product has been approved for use by our company. We currently have crapberry phones. The future looks bright!
Unfortunatly IBMs product offering does not reflect its workforce adoption of Apple products. Almost none of their software is works for OSX eg WebSphere etc.