How Apple played hard to get and seduced the enterprise

15 years ago

Chris Nerney reports for NetworkWorld, “Speaking at Apple’s quarterly earnings conference call in January, acting CEO Tim Cook said, ‘The iPad started shipping in April, and we are already up to 80% of the largest companies deploying or piloting the product. This is unheard of, at least in my dealings with the enterprise over the years. Generally enterprises are much slower, much more cautious and use things that have been in the market for a long time.'”

MacDailyNews Note: Tim Cook is not Apple’s “acting CEO.” Cook remains Apple’s COO and is “responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations” while CEO Steve Jobs is on a medical leave of absence. Jobs continues as Apple’s CEO and is involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

Nerney continues, “Data from Good Technology bears out this trend. In a study released in January, Good reported that among its thousands of corporate and government customers – including more than 40 of the Fortune 100 – nearly two-thirds of net new activations in the fourth quarter were for mobile devices running on Apple’s iOS. The financial and healthcare industries in particular are rapidly adopting Apple’s tablet computer, according to the survey.”

“Chris Hazelton, mobile and wireless research director for The 451 Group in Boston, says three things are driving iPad’s adoption in the enterprise: the increasing number of APIs from mobile device management vendors, the fact that Apple included application-level encryption in iOS 4, and Apple’s Developer Enterprise Program, which (for $299 a year) allows companies to build their own ‘proprietary, non-public applications that can be pushed out to their employees and managed by MDM vendors,'” Nerney reports. “All of which leaves Apple in a position to do something it hasn’t been able or willing to do in 30 years – sell to corporate America.”