Apple puts IBM rivalry to rest with paradigm-smashing corporate sales deal

12 years ago

“Apple Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. are putting aside a rivalry started at the dawn of the personal-computing era to get more businesses to embrace iPhones and iPads,” Adam Satariano and Alex Barinka report for Bloomberg. “The deal unveiled yesterday gives Apple access to an IBM sales force that will recommend Apple’s devices to customers in industries such as health care and banking, which have never been priorities for the consumer-focused iPhone maker. IBM gets a boost in a long-running effort to sell software and services to companies seeking to manage workers’ smartphones and tablets. ‘We really recognized almost simultaneously that we could be uniquely helpful to one another’s strategy and that there was literally no overlap,’ Bridget Van Kralingen, IBM’s senior vice president of global business services, said in an interview.”

“For Armonk, New York-based IBM, the alliance may aid the company’s efforts to catch up after watching other technology companies — including Apple — seize upon the growing popularity of mobile devices,” Satariano and Barinka report. “‘They’re now strongly associated with the premium mobile platform and mobile devices,’ Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said of Apple. ‘If you want to do anything interesting in the enterprise, you now have to check with IBM on what they’re doing with Apple.'”

Apple “has already recognized the potential of the corporate market, touting that its devices are used by employees at 98 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Deutsche Bank AG has almost 20,000 iPhones, while Siemens AG has 30,000, Apple said in April,” Satariano and Barinka report. “‘This is a shot in the arm for IBM and a great validation of Apple in the enterprise space, where they already are a huge success,’ Aaron Levie, chief executive officer of cloud-storage company Box Inc., said in an interview.”

“The partnership — announced with a press release that included a picture of Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty walking together at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California — would be surprising to those following the companies three decades ago,” Satariano and Barinka report. “IBM and Apple were bitter rivals during the early days of the PC. Apple’s famous ‘1984’ Super Bowl television commercial to introduce the Macintosh computer compared IBM to George Orwell’s totalitarian Big Brother. The competition eased as IBM abandoned the PC business and instead focused on software and services geared for corporate clients. Cook also worked at IBM for more than a decade before joining Apple.”

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MacDailyNews Take: Jobs hired Cook. Apple’s rivalry with IBM was put aside many, many years ago. Microsoft became exactly what Steve Jobs railed against in “1984.”