Apple and IBM work together to tap the market potential

BI Chinese station reported on July 17

For Apple and IBM reached the latest cooperation agreement, investors responded mostly to disagree. Under the agreement, IBM will create big data analytics and business applications for the iPhone and iPad, while Apple will begin leveraging a dedicated AppleCare program to power business and enterprise customers.

But maybe these investors need to rethink. According to Re / code, a U.S. tech blog, IBM will deploy about 100,000 staff to perform various functions in this latest partnership with Apple.

Affected by this news, Apple shares in New York on Wednesday trading pre-market at 96.99 US dollars reported a rise of 1.75%.

A group of Wall Street people, including Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, expressed disdain for the cooperation. Munster wrote in an investor study: "In terms of the benefits that Apple will receive, we do not see the cooperation as having a significant impact on our forecasting model because Apple has already made a fortune in Fortune 500 Got strong iOS penetration rate of 98%, and in the world's top 500 companies made 92% penetration. "

Munster added: "For a large company this collaboration is less likely to be a success or failure in using the iOS platform.We noticed that if half of the Fortune 500 companies are due to This cooperation, each of which purchased 2,000 unplanned iPhone smartphones and 1,000 iPad tablets, contributed only 0.5 percentage points to the revenue of Apple in fiscal year 2015. "

Overall, Piper's point of view is that since the iPhone and iPad have a large corporate user base, the latest collaboration between the company and IBM does not result in a high incremental revenue. However, the data provided by the corporate computing company Citrix shows another picture.

According to Citrix, iOS accounts for less than half of the enterprise device market in some markets; moreover, even in the best-performing iOS market, Android still controls about a fifth of enterprise devices market. The following is the May data provided by Citrix:

The figure below provides data by industry, from which it can be seen that in some industries (such as crude oil and advertising, etc.), Apple also forms the "disappeared person" in combat missions. These are potential growth areas for Apple, the enterprise equipment provider:

That's why Re / code's words in its article seem meaningful: "IBM will also start selling iPhones and iPads to its corporate customers and will contribute over 100,000 people to this end, including Consultants and software developers. "

In other words, the significance of this cooperation is not simply to push Apple's products to corporate customers who do not already own these devices. The meaning of the word enterprise in science and technology is "business client," and the reason the business is of great significance is that businesses tend to be slow in upgrading their products and that their "stickiness" Also higher. In other words, once a company buys a piece of new equipment, it's very likely that it will be the customer of the equipment for years to come as the company upgrades equipment and continually buys for it Various software.

If you've worked for a company that has forced you to use poorly-formed devices and software and wondered why this happened, the answer lies here: it's not that you're in a company's IT department is not good enough, but because you want to It is just too hard to move thousands of people from one computing platform to another.

Through this partnership with IBM, Apple now has a way to engage hundreds of IBM customers who will continue to buy more Apple products as they grow.

It should be said that the potential for this cooperation is so great that Google and other Android device manufacturers such as Samsung should be alarmed.

One reason BlackBerry was once very popular is that its devices have a super-secure communication system, while allowing employers to see what information their employees are transmitting. Apple's iOS system is also very safe, there is almost no malware on this platform. In view of this, it is foreseeable that Apple will become the future of the BlackBerry - of course, not the current BlackBerry, the once dominant smartphone maker has now become a protagonist of disaster.

By 2002, Blackberry was undoubtedly a great company; and by working with IBM, Apple may have just taken a big step toward reshaping its business in the coming years. (Swiss snow)