IBM and Apple today announced that they
have just entered a partnership that should improve enterprise mobility.
The collaboration between the two companies
should allow for both companies to utilize each other’s expertise in order to
improve enterprise solutions. Specifically, the partnership will focus on four
specific areas including the provision of industry-specific enterprise
solutions for Apple products, the use of IBM cloud services optimized for iOS,
AppleCare services for enterprise and IBM offerings for device activation and
management.
The products and services resulting in this
deal will be called IBM MobileFirst and will involve IBM selling iPhone and
iPad devices with tailored enterprise solutions to its business clients.
Services included in the MobileFirst
Platform for iOS include end-to-end enterprise solutions from analytics,
workflow, cloud storage, fleet-scale device management, security and
integration.
This move effectively expands Apple’s
product offerings, but at the same time puts the company in direct firing line
of Microsoft, who has been in the business of providing B2B products to
different companies worldwide.
