Apple and IBM Announce Partnership To Bring iOS + Cloud Services To Enterprises

jmcbain writes: According to an article on Recode, Apple and IBM have announced a major partnership to bring mobile services to enterprise customers. "The deal calls for IBM and Apple to develop more than 100 industry-specific applications that will run on the iPhone and iPad. Apple will add a new class of service to its AppleCare program and support aimed at enterprise customers. IBM will also begin to sell iPhones and iPads to its corporate customers and will devote more than 100,000 people, including consultants and software developers, to the effort. Enterprise applications will in many cases run on IBM's cloud infrastructure or on private clouds that it has built for its customers. Data for those applications will co-exist with personal data like photos and personal email that will run on Apple's iCloud and other cloud services."

Re: The end is nigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple certainly isn't running their own cloud servers. They've done everything to get rid of that. IBM is an OK partner... If IBM is interested this week.

If IBM is willing to convert their "Big Iron" platform front ends to Apple's mobile devices we got something really useful that steps on nobody's toes in either company. It's really just a matter of skipping the crappy web interfaces and building out IBM supported ones in native hardware language on both sides.

Personally, IBM is a short sighted, sucky partner. My company "bet the business" on their support offerings, and I've got my career on the IBM i platform... IBM just plain sucks now compared to ten years ago, it's a gutted shell. But they can "sort of roll out" some really cool stuff. IBM just doesn't stick around to make it shine like they used to.

Re:Sweet

[afidel]

No it wasn't, as soon as you install iOS 7 and enable find my iphone the device is locked to that users icloud account, there's a way to disable it but it requires attaching the phone to a physical machine. You can disable the feature through MDM now, but it has zero effect if the user has already set it up (horse meet barn door). We've lost a half dozen devices due to folks being let go and refusing to unlock our property, Apple's gotten better about unlocking the devices in the last couple months, but if they're not on our main account so we can easily show proof of ownership we're SOL.

iOS Management Tools for non-macs

[antifoidulus]

I wonder if this means that Apple will finally port it's iOS management tools to run on something other than OS X server. Ever since Apple killed the XServe(and really even before that) this has been a major hinderance to wider scale enterprise adoption of iOS devices. The tools are actually quite good, but if you are forced to try to cram a bunch of mac minis somewhere or trying to get some mac pros in the server room, it's just a pain. Add to that lack of practical way to deploy OS X server instances on the cloud and you have enterprise customers just not interested in trying to screw around with iPhones. Hopefully this partnership will fix that.

what about letting OS X server be on any VM runnin

[Joe_Dragon]

what about letting OS X server be on any VM running on any base hardware as well.