Giants IBM and Apple announced on Tuesday that they are teaming up to develop more than 100 mobile apps designed specifically for businesses use. Apple’s user-friendly philosophy will ingeniously be combined with IBM’s enhaned expertise when it comes to security, back end systems integration and analytics.
In other words, iPhones and iPads are more likely to be preffered by businessmen on their next small device acquisition. What both companies desire is to objectively increase their palette of users.
“For the first time ever we’re putting IBM’s renowned big data analytics at iOS users’ fingertips, which opens up a large market opportunity for Apple,” said Apple chief executive Tim Cook in a statement. “This is a radical step for enterprise and something that only Apple and IBM can deliver.” Rumor has it that Apple icon, Steve Jobs, wouldn’t have ageed to this deal, as he had never been an IBM fan. “We’ve come from 30 years ago being competitors to today being incredibly complementary,” Cook added.
In the befining of the 1980s, IBM became Apple’s most redoutable rival by producing the IBM PC. In 1984, Apple’s famous Super Bowl commercial for the very first Macintosh computer featured an ominous “Big Brother” that clearly represented IBM. However in 1991 Apple, IBM and Motorola joined forces in order to produce the PowerPC chips used in Apple computers. In 2006 Apple began to incorporate Intel chips.
The deal, to by both sides as being an “exclusive partnership,” will offer Apple a shortcut into business markets that the company has long been searching for, especially as it tries to counter growing mobile competition from Google and Microsoft.
In other words it’s useless for Blackbery fans to cry over spilled milk, as both iOS and Android devices have long outdated their company. Actually BlackBerry’s shares went down 3% following the announcement.
According to Bridget van Kralingen, IBM’s senior vice president of global business services, the company is also planning to develop cloud services personalised on Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS. “We wanted to remove some of the existing barriers of mobile in enterprise,” she said. These cloud services will be tied together via the “IBM MobileFirst Platform for iOS.”
The IBM plus Apple partnership is also designed to take advantage of the 4,000 application programming interfaces that Apple has opened up to developers in iOS 8.
To prove the whole deal is not a hoax, Apple released a photo of Cook walking through Apple’s campus Tuesday with IBM CEO and President Ginni Rometty.
